


Infinite Deep

by ancientroots



Category: Tennis no Oujisama | Prince of Tennis, 未来日記 | Mirai Nikki | Future Diary
Genre: M/M, Major Character Injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-11
Updated: 2015-09-11
Packaged: 2018-04-20 06:10:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 29,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4776548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancientroots/pseuds/ancientroots
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Six years after Seigaku won Nationals, most things are as they should be. What isn't - Fuji’s damaged leg, Tezuka’s growing disinterest in tennis, Yanagi’s distance and Ryoga's selfish willingness to throw his best friend under the bus - well, that’s all a part of growing up, isn’t it? And then one day, in this tale of live and let live, growing up and letting go, these tennis addicts wake up to find strange self-updating journals on their doorsteps. What is Infinite Deep? An ending. But what ending? And as time sloughs away beneath their feet, they have to ask: is it even possible to prevent it?</p><p>Note: You don't need to have watched Mirai Nikki to read this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The Infinite Deep  
Chapter One

There is an incessant beeping. 

Seiichi, face buried in his pillow, mumbles, “You set it.”

Not bothering to answer the accusation, Genichirou rolls over, feels around on his bedside table, and slams down on the clock. The beeping doesn’t stop.

Seiichi groans. “Phone. Your phone.”

He feels around again, and grabs his phone this time. Eyes closed, he swipes a finger sidewards, and puts the phone to his ear. 

“Good morning,” says a voice, clearly amused. 

His eyes open. “Renji.”

“You’re up late.” 

Six years on, it still makes him flush. 

“Seiichi,” he says. “Renji’s calling.”

“No, don’t…”

“Renji?” Seiichi is already propping himself up on his elbows. “Put him on loudspeaker.”

“Good morning, Seiichi.” The poor quality of the speaker makes his voice crackle.

“What’s up?”

“I was up early writing an essay, that’s all.”

“What’s it on?”

“Ancient Rome.” 

“You’re studying Ancient Rome now?”

“Yes.”

“Ah,” says Seiichi. “So you change subjects every term.”

That, of course, has an effect tantamount to pointing and shouting at the elephant in the room. 

Renji says, “Yes.” And then, with little finesse, “Are you eating properly, Seiichi?”

Genichirou has rarely seen that smile, fond and exasperated, directed at anyone other than him. “Yes. Not that that will affect anything.”

“And you, Genichirou? Looking both ways before you cross?”

He hates this question. Renji says it lightly, as if it were a joke. But the elephant in the room just gets bigger. “Yes.”

“And you, Renji?” asks Seiichi. “How are you?”

“I’m fine. A lot of schoolwork, that’s all.” 

“Oh.”

Another silence.

“I have to go,” says Renji. “Good luck with your training, Seiichi.”

“And with the Olympics?” Another light question. It makes Genichirou tense, and Seiichi puts a hand on his arm, warning. 

“No.” It is an exhalation, a final decision. “I’ll say that later today, actually, when I see you.”

“What?” 

Seiichi’s response is more measured, but his fingers slacken, and Genichirou knows that he is just as surprised. “You’re seeing us today?”

“If you aren’t busy.”

“No, no, I’m not. I mean, I have practice today, and Genichirou has classes, but…”

“My classes end at one,” he interjects.

“And practice ends at seven, but…”

“I’ll meet you afterwards,” says Renji. “I’ll come to the training centre.”

“That would be great.”

“I have to go now.”

“Okay. Have a good day, Renji.”

“You too. And Genichirou, bring your racket.” The line goes dead.

Seiichi’s head sinks back onto the pillow. But he is facing Genichirou, and the wonder in his eyes is obvious. “It’s been three months,” he says.

“Ah.”

He turns, and this time, his voice is muffled by the pillow. “I thought it would be another three.”

“Ah.”

“He wants to play tennis.”

Genichirou doesn’t know what to think of that, either. 

 

Kanata doesn’t realise just how engrossed he’d been, until he opens the door.

“Good morning,” says Kazuya. The look on his face is so awkward, torn between stiff indifference and chaos, that it makes Kanata think of papier mâché.

“Good morning,” he echoes. 

They stand there. The awkward look intensifies, and Kanata remembers to step back, let him in. “I packed your stuff into a box. In the kitchen.”

“You didn’t have to. Thank you.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

He watches Kazuya toe off his shoes, put a foot on the raised landing. Suddenly, he feels sick. “Wait. I’ll go get it for you.”

“It’s fine, I…”

“Wait here,” he says, too harshly.

Kazuya blanches. He is so easy to read, for someone reputed to have a similar personality to Tezuka-kun’s. Kanata softens his tone. “There’s no need to take off your shoes. It’s easier for me to get it. It makes more sense.”

Before he can argue, Kanata turns around and heads back into the kitchen. The box is on the table. Somehow, his notes have gotten all over it, as if it were simply a raised part of the same surface. He ignores the tightening feeling in his chest. Collecting his notes, he places them in a stack next to the phone. 

The phone had arrived in the mail a few days ago. At first, he’d thought it a prank, or a gift. It was a good phone, the Samsung 4S. But no one claimed the prank, and no one knew what gift he meant, and so he’d been reduced to checking through every application on the thing, looking for a clue.

Yesterday, he’d found the diary. 

The self-updating diary.

Every day, at a random time, Kanata would find a new entry waiting for him. Written in a short, clipped tone, an example of the detached voice his first-year literature class had pounded into his head. The story itself was episodic, and repetitive in the extreme. Each arc started out on a triumphal note, detailing the physical attributes of each conquest. Then, personal traits would make their way into the entries, and the tone would soften. The gender didn’t seem to matter, only the degree to which the writer could both romanticise and shred his current target. And then would come the tentative hope, the vow of potential commitment.

Initiation. Intensification. Fulfilment.

Hefting the box into his arms, he leans down for a look at the screen. The new entry has arrived. He heads back out into the landing.

“Sorry for the wait.”

“It’s fine.” Kazuya takes the box from him.

“Goodbye, then.”

Kazuya looks at him, with his papier mâché poker face. And as always, as always, he relents. “Have a good day, Kazuya. Echizen-kun, too.”

“Kanata.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t want to talk about it now.”

Silence.

“I mean it. Have a good day.”

At last, a nod. “You too.”

The door closes. 

Kanata returns to the kitchen, sits down in his chair. He scans the newest entry, and then picks up a pen. 

Initiation.

Intensification.

Fulfilment. 

These are the words he has written on one of his many notes; the first part of this arc completed. This is the second part.

Differentiation. The feeling of being suffocated, of wishing to be apart. 

Circumscription. The forced severance of parts of their combined lives.

Fallout. Disillusionment. Resignation. And a self-hatred strong enough to overwhelm. 

The plot, Kanata realises, doesn’t change. 

There is a thud, a knock. He stiffens. His neighbour’s voice, saying in that loud and cheerful voice of hers, “Kei-chan!”

Kanata doesn’t realise, until he hears these words, just how tense he’d been. 

 

Infinite Deep.

Infinite Deep.

Infinite Deep.

Syusuke watches the last line in the Plotting Diary flicker, turning dark and turning light and then turning dark again. He doesn’t know what it means. But then, he doesn’t know what any of it means.

Detective Conan’s Ending 43 tinkles, in peaceful harmony with the rain outside. His leg throbs, significantly less pleased with the weather. Syusuke smiles at the thought, and picks up his phone.

“Tezuka.”

“I’m coming home late today.”

“I see. Do you want me to keep dinner?”

“No need. I’m eating with Yukimura.”

“Okay. Have fun.”

Tezuka doesn’t answer, or end the call. 

“Was there something else?”

“No.”

“Okay.” He knows Tezuka can hear him smiling. 

“Goodbye.”

Syusuke places the phone back on the coffee table. Picks up the other phone. The words have stopped flickering, seemed to have settled on a black closer to grey than to the bottomless dark of an abyss. 

“He’s playing tennis,” he tells the grey letters. “With Yukimura.”

The letters don’t change. Flicking through the diaries on the phone, he sees that there is no change to them. Infinite Deep is as black as it was three days ago. 

He stops at the last one, a photojournal. The last shot is artfully taken, the remnants of rain glistening under the recovered sun. Considering the angle, he gets up and goes into his and Tezuka’s room. 

When he re-emerges, camera in hand, the rain has stopped. 

He opens the living room window, cranes his neck just so, and snaps. Pressing the ‘images’ button, he smiles. It is a good shot.

It is exactly the same.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two 

Seiichi noticed him the second time. 

Even after all these years, his first response to Renji’s presence was as an expectation met, and quickly disregarded. 

Renji nodded at him, then jerked his head back towards the court. 

The sound of the ball smacking onto linoleum snapped him back into focus, and his racquet cut downwards. What should have been the final shot was too slow, hit without the same intense force. Kazuya returned the ball, and Seiichi, suddenly fired up, rectified his mistake twice over. 

“Game, and the match, Yukimura!”

Renji was smiling. 

Seiichi knew he was smiling too. Smiling because he’d won, smiling because Renji was there and, really, if the man hadn’t jabbed his pen in the direction of the court, then Seiichi would have forgotten all about Tokugawa and the customary handshake. 

“You’re early,” he said, afterwards. 

“You’re using a new racquet.”

He hefted it in his hand. “Coach Sakaki suggested it.”

“It’s not a bad choice.”

“But?”

Like always, it is the hesitation, the physical pause, which alerts him where all else fails. Renji is tired today. “The other model he suggested to you. That has the better weight.”

He glanced down at his open tennis bag. The other racquet. “Ah.”

“You’ve improved.”

“I would hope so, since high school.”

“Since Melbourne.”

“You watched?” 

“Every moment.” His eyes opened when he said it. Seiichi had forgotten their colour, unchanging steel in the stark light of the tennis courts. 

“How did you get in?”

“Tezuka.”

“You met Tezuka then.”

Renji nods. The silence they have walked themselves into is thick, and Seiichi breaks it with an awkward gesture in Tokugawa’s direction. “You’ve met Tokugawa.”

“Yes. Good evening, Tokugawa-san.”

“Yanagi Renji?” he asks, and nods a greeting when Renji nods his confirmation. “Yukimura talks about you sometimes. He says you collect data?”

Tokugawa and Renji talk, making their way down the list of polite questions. Seiichi takes the chance to pack his towel, bottle and racquets away into his bag, to drape his coat over his shoulders, and try to think of something to say to Renji on the walk to the train station. 

“I’ve seen Inui’s notebooks,” Tokugawa is saying. “All those equations and graphs. Such mathematical knowledge must be required. How do you measure it?”

“Inui quantifies it somehow,” Renji says. “You must ask him. I have comparative methods.”

“Comparative?”

How hard can it be, Seiichi tells himself. It was only ten minutes to the train station. It had taken three hours to beat Echizen Ryoma in Melbourne. It can’t be hard. 

“Seiichi?”

He looks up. Tokugawa has already exited the court, and is making his way up the bleachers to the doors. Renji’s notebook and pen are gone, likely into one of his deep coat pockets. His eyes had slid closed when Tokugawa began to speak to him.

Seiichi slings his bag over his shoulder, forces a smile. “How certain are you that Genichirou is still at the train station?”

It is a redundant question. They both know. 

“He isn’t. At 6.40 p.m., he must have just gotten on the train. By the time we walk there, he will have arrived.”

“I see.”

As kindly as he’d answered, Renji elects to carry on speaking. He informs Seiichi of how he’d narrowed down the choices of neighbourhood and exact house to the one Seiichi and Genichirou had decided on, a thought process and data analysis that, when explained, takes exactly ten minutes.

Seiichi, electing to be kind in return, does not point out that the monologue is not a conversation. 

When they walk down the steps, emerging into stale air, dirty tiles and lights, the train has just arrived. Genichirou is among the first to emerge. Seiichi raises a hand, alerting him to their presence.

Genichirou’s eyes flick between him and Renji, and then he tugs his cap down.

“Good evening, Genichirou,” says Renji, when he is near enough to hear. 

A grunt. They are already down to grunts. 

Seiichi senses a presence behind him, and instinctively steps forward, letting it pass. He realises that they are standing in front of the door to the men’s toilets. He’s used this subway so many times, and he’s never done that before. Perhaps it was because Renji had hugged the wall so tightly as they walked down…

“Tezuka,” says Genichirou. 

Tezuka looks at the three of them. He is still in training clothes, his Yonex sponsor blazer zipped up all the way. Water glistens on his hands, just washed and dried. 

“Sanada,” he says. 

Tezuka ends up coming with them. 

Seiichi finds himself both disappointed and relieved. At least, Tezuka and Renji, who have reacquainted themselves over the past year, can exhaust the list of moderately more involved questions over dinner.

And Seiichi can use the time to think if the most obvious reason why Renji wanted that to happen, is the only reason. 

 

Kazuya stows the contents of the box beneath the bed. It’s his bed, but he has trouble thinking about it that way. He’s rarely slept here, since he and Kanata decided to take their relationship to the next level. 

How delicately put, Kanata would have said. 

He nearly smiles. Then, his eyes fall onto the wardrobe on the opposite wall, and he remembers how all his clothes are now organised by colour and function, and the smile slips away.

Things under the bed will get dusty, Ryoga says in his head.

The clock is also on the wall. It is nearly nine-thirty. 

He’d thought himself too tired for anger. When Ryoga, his last match with Tezuka wrapped up, had told him he was going out with friends today, he’d been calm. When his own match with Yukimura had wrapped up, and he’d gotten his things from Kanata, and come home and showered and changed, he’d been calm. Training, reflection on training, the meeting with Yanagi, occupied his thoughts.

Annoyed at himself for letting them stop, he went out to the living room and rummaged around in his bag. Ryoga would have wanted him to put it away properly, but Ryoga wasn’t home.

Locating the notebook, he began to flick through it. The more he confirmed for himself, the more he could feel a grin breaking out on his face. He was right.

When he’d first torn open the envelope and seen the notebook, he’d thought that Ryoma was playing a trick on him, sending him one of Ryoma’s middle school senior’s data books. But the more he’d read of the thing, the more uncertain he’d become. 

He knew little about Inui as it was, but the man had been in the papers a few months ago, a small article in the education section discussing advances in robotic science. The way the data was laid out didn’t mesh with that. Comparing the speed of a tennis ball to a slice of winter wind; relating the deterioration in someone’s temper to a heating microwave; narrating the warring qualities of patience and spontaneity in a friend’s essays; these were things that suggested a more literary turn of the mind. And a stronger general interest in humanity. 

Yanagi Renji was a literature and history major. The pleasant way he spoke reminded Kazuya of Kanata; designed to put him at ease. 

This was Yanagi Renji’s notebook. His diary, so to speak. 

But there was still so much he didn’t know. Who’d sent him the notebook? Yanagi? There had been no recognition in his eyes, no flash of knowingness. But then, Kazuya could prod Tezuka all day about something he knew he’d done, and he would have gotten no response from him either. 

What did Infinite Deep mean? It was not part of the journal. The anonymous note, printed in Times New Roman, 12 font, had stated that it was not. It was an ending. One that he was meant to prevent. One that, if he could figure out who the owner of the diary was, and its true nature, he might be able to prevent. 

And hence the most important question. How wise was it for him to obey an anonymous note, even from the deliverer of a self-updating notebook, and not tell anyone?

If Yukimura and Sanada knew about this, he would figure out the truth a lot faster.

Infinite Deep stared back at him, impassive.

He sighed. 

When the door opened, and shoes scraped against the mat, he realised his stomach was growling. It irritated him.

If asked, he would have to conclude this as the reason why, when Ryoga came into the room, he snapped, “And who the hell have you been fucking tonight?”

Golden eyes widened. The eyes that had gotten him into this shit in the first place. And then the smirk. Ryoga shucked off his coat, draped it over the arm of the sofa, and dropped down into the sofa opposite him. A neat, elegant drunk. 

“No one.”

“You wouldn’t even remember it.”

“And isn’t that ironic.”

Needles out, and they’d barely even started.

That was okay. That, Kazuya thought, with an angry twist to his mouth, was normal. 

 

Kunimitsu never tried not to wake him. Fuji was too light a sleeper for that. When he opened the door and toed off his shoes, he called ‘tadaima’ as he usually would, and when he went into the bedroom, he turned on the lights.

Fuji was already awake. He smiled. “Okaeri.”

The sharp, misty smell of ointment filled the room. It’d been raining today. “Does it still hurt?”

“It stopped awhile ago.”

He started to strip off his clothes. 

“Anything?”

Fuji’s questions are always general. They aren’t tiresome, as most such questions are, because he asks only one, and Tezuka can select what few events were important in the day and report them all at once. 

“My stamina needs work. Yanagi was there. He came to play tennis with Sanada and Yukimura. He was…” Kunimitsu paused. “trying to gather data. On me.”

Fuji tips his head. It’s almost questioning, but he is really thinking, moving beyond the awkward words to hear what is beneath. “Why the sudden interest?” he muses. “He can gather information just by talking to you on campus, or by watching your matches if what he wants is tennis data. But he wanted first-hand, on-court data.”

Kunimitsu drops his clothes into the basket, and takes a towel and sleep wear into the bathroom across the floor. Fuji waits until he’s done his business on the toilet and brushed his teeth, and then when the shower hisses into being, knocks on the door and enters. Leaning against the basin, he says, loudly enough to be heard over the spray, “Do you think Sanada or Yukimura know?”

Tezuka hates talking in the shower. Talking and bathing are two separate activities. He doesn’t answer, and lets Fuji make his own conclusons. 

“They couldn’t have. Yanagi’s not talked to them since, well, you know.”

A moment. “Maybe he wants to go pro?”

Low laughter. “Unlikely.”

“Maybe it’s about that boyfriend he told me about. Maybe he wants to go pro.”

“Maybe he has a crush on you, Tezuka.”

He closes his eyes, lets the water push shampoo froth down his face. Fuji’s attention has drifted. Kunimitsu hadn’t expected him to think about it seriously for as long as he has. 

“Tezuka,” says Fuji. His tone requires an answer.

“Yes.”

“You can tell me when you are playing tennis. For fun.”

This too requires an answer. But this time, he doesn’t oblige. They dance around each other as Oishi accuses them of doing, but Kunimitsu won’t lie. 

And he knows, they both know, that he can’t.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter Three

The smash is like a gunshot in the chaos of the indoor courts. 

Renji watches the smile stretch over Seiichi’s face, and finds himself smiling in response. Genichirou, eyeing the ball as it rolls back towards him, is not so easily swayed. He tugs his cap downwards, picks up the ball, glares at it almost reprimandingly, and then tosses it back to Seiichi to serve. 

“Tarundoru,” he says. “Your serve has slowed.”

Seiichi glances at Renji. A sense of déjà vu washes over him, and he takes a moment to reply. “Twelve point five percent slower. You’re tired.”

Mentally clucking at himself, Seiichi serves again. 

“Does he not trust Sanada’s judgement?”

Tezuka’s voice is unexpected. It jarrs the familiarity of the courts, the scene before him, and Renji is reminded ruefully of the other reason for his being here. He shakes his head. “He does. It is preciseness that he expects from me.”

A nod. 

“Your game has improved, Tezuka.”

“How so?”

Renji has a sudden image of Sadaharu, phone tucked into the crook of his shoulder and ear, delivering his entire’s notebook’s contents an entire thousand miles across the sea to his former captain in Germany. 

“You’ve solved the weakness in the Tezuka Zone.”

A nod. 

“Did Fuji help you?”

“Ah.”

How unexpected. It’d been a guess, but one he had not seriously thought to be true. Perhaps Fuji has changed too, somewhere beneath the occasional run-ins and polite conversations that really say nothing. 

“Your game. You’ve reverted to your old playing style.”

This time, Tezuka hesitates. “I have.” It is half an admission, half a question.

“It has not been detrimental so far,” says Renji. “But it increases your chances of losing to Seiichi by three percent.”

“My old playing style is weaker.”

“More inflexible. Less focused.”

“Inflexible.” But Renji, used to Genichirou’s stumbling communications, suspects that the truly troubling part was ‘less focused’. Tezuka lowers his head, crosses his arms. 

“Game, Yukimura,” calls Seiichi. “Come, Genichirou, tarundoru.”

Renji shakes his head. Seiichi is in good form today. It is no wonder that he and Tezuka lost so badly to Genichirou and him, earlier. 

The ball thuds past Seiichi, hitting the baseline. 

“In,” says Genichirou.

“Out,” says Seiichi.

They turn to him. 

“In,” he decides.

“Fifteen-love.” A tilt of his cap upwards. That is Genichirou’s version of smirking. 

Seiichi’s eyes narrow. “Hm.” He tosses the ball across the net, and slides into receiving stance. 

“Yanagi,” says Tezuka. 

“Yes.”

“What do you think is the difference?”

He can’t define it. When he’d first received the diary, he’d dragged out all his notebooks on Tezuka, he’d rewatched some of the more important matches, he’d trawled through every magazine and newspaper article he could get his hands on, and he’d researched everything from Tezuka’s German team to the degree he was now studying in Keio. There is a definite shape to the difference, a vague thought in Renji’s mind that would have frustrated Sadaharu. But he can’t define it.

There are, he knows, missing pieces.

“Tezuka,” he says at last. “Do you still enjoy tennis?”

Barely a change. Barely. 

“Why is that?”

“Game,” says Seiichi. “Yukimura.”

The match ends six to three. Seiichi and Genichirou come to sit with them on the bleachers. Renji hands a bottle to each. Seiichi accepts his with thanks. Genichirou takes his and chugs half of it down at once. 

“Your ka has improved by thirty-three percent,” Renji tells him. “I extrapolate that you have decided to take the test this weekend.”

“What test?” asks Tezuka.

“Fourth dan for kendo,” says Seiichi. 

“That is a worthy goal, Sanada.”

“Ah.”

Seiichi very measuredly begins to drink. Likely, he is mimicking the formal exchange in his head. 

Then, just as measuredly, Seiichi asks, “Will you come to watch?”

Genichirou tenses.

Tezuka glances away, down the rows of half-populated courts, the people straggling back to their games after watching an Olympic hopeful play. Renji is caught once again, by how much more sensitive Tezuka is to his surroundings than his manner suggested.

“I can’t.”

Seiichi tenses, now. 

“I won’t be in Tokyo.”

“You won’t?”

“I’m going somewhere.”

There is a fifty percent chance that Seiichi will ask one of two questions. And a ten percent chance that Genichirou will ask one.

Genichirou asks. “Are you going with Okada-san?”

He has picked up on the pattern, then. A mistaken pattern, but an understandable estimation. It is a pity Renji can’t encourage it further. “A professor. He is going to England for a conference, and he asked me to come with him.”

Genichirou, who understands, looked pleased. 

Seiichi, who doesn’t, says, “Why?”

“The conference is being held at Oxford,” he says. “It’s a chance for me to meet experts in post-war comparative literature from all over the world.”

Seiichi’s face clears. “And that’s good, right? That means he thinks you’re good.”

There is an eighty-five percent chance that that is true, but Renji is not so lost in science that he doesn’t believe in bad luck. He smiles, and lets Seiichi say for him what he is too afraid, too hopeful, to say for himself. 

A racquet, pointed in his face. “Play me, Renji. We need to celebrate.”

Tezuka’s face is impassive, and yet manages to convey disbelief. 

“There is a ninety-three point forty-five percent chance that I…”

“Renji.”

There. The note of command in his voice. Few people refuse it. But the reason why Renji does not, and he knows this with an acidic resignation, has little to do with command. Seiichi and Genichirou are looking him with an openness in their faces, one that he hasn’t seen in a long time. And in that openness, Seichii had asked him. 

He picks up his racquet. 

 

In school, Kanata had been taught Bayesian analysis. Take the patient’s history, perform a physical examination, order tests, analyse the results, and then make your hypotheses. Assign statistical probabilities to each symptom and test, based on existing databases. Follow the logarithms of potentiality. Accept only what can be proven.

Outside school, Kanata realised: it was never that simple. 

If he applied it as he’d been taught, he would not be sitting here right now. He would be sitting in his room, wondering which bar in Tokyo he should start with. This decision, right here, had been instinct. 

“So, you thought your tragic one-night-stander might come around here.”

“Exactly.”

The bartender laughs. “That is a good story. I like it.”

“You’ll buy my book, then?” he purrs. 

Next to him, Shuu is cringing. 

“Maybe. Depends. Is this doctor, your narrator, hot?”

“Of course.”

“Will my all-inspiring bar get a dedication?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll buy it,” he says. 

“That’s great! Another drink, please. And for my friend too.”

The bartender nods, moves away. 

Shuu says, “Why am I here again?”

“Two is better than one.”

“Kanata. I love you, you’re my best friend, but what the hell was that story about? Since when are you a writer?”

“I was hoping for drinks on the house.”

A raised eyebrow. That was it. 

“I’m in the throes of grief.”

Two raised eyebrows. 

“Shuu, I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

He considers his answer. “It’s a patient.”

“A patient!”

“If you shut up,” he says. “I’ll buy you drinks for a week.”

“Two weeks.”

“Two weeks.”

The bartender returns, drinks in hand. “On the house,” he says. 

Shuu waits until his back was turned, and then says, “That doesn’t make your excuse any more believable, Kanata.”

“I wasn’t lying.”

“I know.” And Shuu does know. His expression is sad, pitying enough for that. Kanata reminds himself that pity, from friends, is well-meant. 

Still, when he excuses himself to go to the toilet, Kanata is relieved. He doesn’t have to restrain himself from snapping anymore. 

“So,” says the bartender. “How does this doctor know, who in the bar is his tragic one-night-stander?”

Kanata smiles. “He asks the bartender.”

A moment’s processing. And then laughter. “And what did the bartender do?”

“He told the doctor about a few of his regulars. There was one in particular that he remembered. A young man who was a notorious one-night-stander, picking up people left and right, but always, always with a few weeks in between.”

The man pauses. There is surprise in his eyes. “What do you know. There is a guy like that.”

Kanata opens his eyes wide. “Really?”

“A real lady-killer. He used to get really drunk when he was younger, I’d just started here then, and after that he cleaned up a little. Still comes looking for booty every once in a while. Strange thing is, he started showing up again a few months back, but he hasn’t picked up anyone. Thought he was going respectable, but then what would the man be doing here every night, right.”

Kanata’s hands tightens around his glass. Too coincidental, he thought. It was too coincidental. How he hated instinct. 

“Realism,” he says. “Always a good thing in a story.”

“Is it?” chortles the bartender. “I always liked happier stories myself.”

He smiles. “Reality can be happy, too.”

“Man, there’s a reason why realism and idealism are opposites, you know.”

They aren’t, but he keeps on smiling. Raises his glass and says, “To opposites.”

A voice calls for a drink, rising above the din of the dance music. The bartender nods to him, and leaves. Kanata watches him go, lost in a swirl of nameless, heavy thoughts. He watches him go, and his eyes fall upon the owner of the voice. When his eyes widen this time, he isn’t pretending.

Echizen Ryoga stares like his younger brother. Innocently.

“Kanata?” After a moment, Shuu curses. “That fucker.”

“Don’t say that,” is his automatic response. 

“He is a fucker!”

“Shuu.”

“What is he doing here?”

“Let’s go home.” His chest is tight. Hot. He feels like he is going to be sick. 

“We don’t have to go home. He…”

“Shuu,” he repeats, harshly.

“Don’t be so nice, Kanata!”

He puts his drink down, and stalks out. Shuu will come, he knows. He knows, so he doesn’t look back to check. 

It’s everyone’s fault. It’s everyone’s fault, and if Shuu could just see that, if Kanata had seen that, then maybe…

The air outside is smoky, sour and thick with the reek of alcohol and vomit. He stares at a high school student sitting in a pool of her own vomit, her eyes blank with something like shell-shock. 

“Shuu,” he says. “Let’s go see if she’s alright.”

There is no answer.

When he looks behind him, he sees that he is alone. He looks at the girl, looks at the door. And then runs back inside. 

Echizen Ryoga is sitting in his own pool, of isolation. Kanata pushes past the crowd, grabs Shuu’s arm. His friend’s muscles tremble beneath his fingers, but he seems more shocked than angry, and when he looks at Echizen, he seems unhurt. 

He doesn’t mean to meet his eyes. 

But the look in them, it fixes him in place.

When Kanata had found the journal on the phone, he’d made sure to read each entry carefully. Then, he’d tested them by writing out their common points and their differences. He’d analysed the results, and come to a diagnosis: a man, bisexual, whose every relationship followed a set path of disintegration, hunted to destruction by an overwhelming, dogged fear. 

But he’d done what he wasn’t supposed to do. He’d come up with the hypothesis first. He’d felt a destination, and focused his attention on that. 

A doctor’s intuition. Irreducible to logarithm. Sparked by a patient’s unknowing tells.

Looking into Echizen’s eyes, seeing the final proof there, he is torn. He doesn’t know if he should laugh, or punch him. 

Echizen Ryoga, with all the nerve that drew Kazuya to him in the first place, is the owner of the Plotting Diary. 

Kanata has found his Samaritan project. 

 

Fuji watches Infinite Deep flicker once more. Whoever is working on the Plotting Diary is making progress. 

He twists the cap back onto the bottle of ointment. His hands tingle from the peppermint-like sensation of the thing, and his leg is painfully hot. It will go numb in a few minutes, and he will be able to sleep. 

After washing his hands, he climbs under the covers, turns off the lights and flicks through the diaries on the phone. The diary that he’s identified as Tezuka’s, and hence dubbed the Ultra-Future Diary, has also seen its ending phrase lighten to a deep grey. He smiles, and wonders how long it will take for the person to figure out the diary’s true nature.

He wonders if he can figure out its true nature.

The smile turns bitter on his mouth. 

Well. Time to start on the diary in his possession, he supposes.

Picking up his phone, he dials a number.

“Hello, Fuji-san?”

“Akise-kun. Are you free tomorrow?”

A moment. He can hear Akise drawling to someone in the distance, “Am I free, Ryoma?”

The response is too soft to catch. 

“Yes, Fuji-san. I am.”

“I was wondering, if you wanted to do something with me.”


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter Four

The girls won’t stop talking.

They are in a library, and they are whispering, but their whispering is louder than talking, and Genichirou stands up, intent on telling them to shut up.

“What are you going to do for Valentine’s Day?”

He stands for a second longer. And then sits down. In his head, he can hear Seiichi laughing. 

“Make chocolates,” says the other girl. “I still have this cookbook from high school. What about you?”

“Shiraishi-san doesn’t like chocolates. I gave them to him last year, and he told me he was allergic to them. Maybe I’ll give him sweets.”

“Sakura-san said that she gave him sweets last year, and he was allergic to them too.”

The girls are quiet, thinking.

“It should be something special,” said the chocolates girl. “Something personal. Shiraishi-san likes tennis, maybe, maybe I’ll get wrist guards. Pink ones with hearts on them, so he knows what I mean.”

He waits for the sweets girl to tell her that this is ridiculous.

“Good idea. Maybe I’ll give Souta-kun something similar. He’s always wearing caps. Maybe one with hearts on it.”

“Do you think Shiraishi-san would like a cap?”

He should go stop this conversation. If only to save Shiraishi and this Souta-kun. 

And then a third girl pipes up. “There shouldn’t be hearts on a Valentine gift. That’s so obvious. Valentine’s gifts should be for the person you’re giving them to. Something simple would be good. Homemade chocolates. They’re from the heart. I would like a present that came from the heart.”

“Are you saying,” hisses the sweets girl. “That you have more heart?”

Their bickering is far past library volume now, but Genichirou is not listening. Rather, he is remembering. 

“The botanical garden is an excellent idea,” says Renji. “They are twenty-two percent more informative than a hike, and fifty-seven times more likely to offer rare species of flora.”

He switches off the lights in the locker room, turns the key in the lock. The tennis courts of Rikkaidai’s high school division sink into the same darkness, locked away by the same key, to await another day. The first-year whose extra laps Genichirou had been supervising has left already. The school is empty. 

Otherwise, Sanada Genichirou’s fretting would have been someone’s entertainment for the rest of the year.

“Seiichi might know all that information already,” he grumbles.

“He won’t. I estimate that he won’t know at least twenty-two percent of what is there.”

He doesn’t question Renji’s methodology. The explanation would take up the entire ten minutes’ walk to the train station, and they have more important things to talk about. 

“What if he expects me to talk?” he says, suddenly. 

“What?”

“About plants.”

“This isn’t tennis, Genichirou,” says Renji, with a seriousness that can only be teasing. “Seiichi is only unreasonable when it comes to tennis.”

“I don’t know anything about plants.”

“You don’t have to.”

Perhaps it was the first year. The first year who was not Kirihara, because Kirihara had moved to England. Perhaps it was because the reception was bad, in this stormy, threatening weather, and he hadn’t heard Renji’s real voice for over two months. Perhaps it was because when Genichirou had modelled the scenario in his head, he and Seiichi in the garden, surrounded by poisonous plants, he’d realised what was missing. 

“Come with us.”

Silence.

“Please, Genichirou. Think of the occasion.”

“I have,” he says, stiffly. He doesn’t know how to react when Renji is angry. He so rarely is. 

Renji is quiet again. 

And then: “I know I haven’t come back as often as I should have. I understand what you are thinking. There is a ninety percent chance that Seiichi would be happy to see me. But that would not be a present from you. At best, it would be from us both.”

He doesn’t understand. 

Renji says, “Go to the garden. Don’t do anything unnecessary. Seiichi will love it. It’s something that comes from your heart.” And then he hangs up. 

The next time they speak, it’s after Fuji’s accident. There are queries, and there are answers, and when the conversation turns to how he is handling the whole thing, it is met with silence. Genichirou realises then, that at some point, Renji has stopped telling him things. Important things.

“Chocolates,” screeches the third girl. “I’m going to confess to Shiraishi-san with chocolates, home-made chocolates, and you’ll see!”

And then the three of them fall silent.

When Genichirou looks up, he sees Shiraishi, finger on his lips and a sheepish smile on his face. 

He has the strongest urge to say, ‘tarundoru’. 

 

8.00 p.m. Echizen looks guilty and pained. Offer him a hand and apologise for Shuu. Check for injuries. Ask him to come with you. He won’t refuse because he feels that he has wronged you. 

8.05 p.m. He scraped his elbow when he fell. Help him wash the cut and put on a plaster. He doesn’t speak at all. The tension is thick so you keep your voice light, soothing, and impersonal.

8.14 p.m. He thanks you. This is the time to ask. He feels indebted to you now, and he’s had time to persuade himself to calm down. You ask him how Kazuya is. He’s faster than you anticipated, and catches your implications immediately. Perhaps it’s because he remembers that you know about his drinking and his fucking from years ago. He tells you that he and Kazuya aren’t going out. They are living together as they have always done, but they are not going out. His voice is even, but you can tell that he believes this whole mess is his fault. You agree despite yourself, and you must be careful not to let this show. You tell him to go home, before Kazuya gets worried. There are a lot of things he wants to say to you, and perhaps you should help him. But you are tired. You smile to reassure him, and then you let him go. 

Ryoga’s head is pounding. He has to squint at the phone to get himself to concentrate long enough, but the meaning of the words sink in regardless. And so does the embarassment and the shame. 

He is so easy to read. He is so easy to manipulate. And he is so easy to comfort.  
Most importantly, Irie Kanata can play him like a puppet, and chose not to leave him feeling more like scum than he already did. 

And Ryoga does not know what to think of that. 

So, as always, he decides to think about what he can think about. 

Putting down his glass of water, he props his arms up on the counter, and considers his situation. He knows who the owner of the Emotions Diary is. But he has no idea what the true nature of the diary is supposed to be. If he does not know it, then he can’t begin to whittle down the darkness of the Infinite Deep.

How does a person learn the true nature of anything?

Idly, he scrolls down the diary entries.

12.00 a.m. Report for night shift at the hotline. Kujo-san from Seat 1144 looks uncomfortable. He’s afraid that Caller 4129 will call again. Offer to exchange seats with him. 

12.05 a.m. Caller 3351 calls. She’s disoriented to discover that she is speaking to a different person. You surmise that she must be a regular caller. So you assure her that Listener 1144 will be back tomorrow night, and ask her if there is anything you can help with. She tells you that she’s found a boyfriend, and that she thinks it’s really The One, and that she wants to offer to have sex with him. But she’s afraid that once she’s done that, he’ll leave her, like all the others have done. She starts to mumble to herself after this, her voice growing darker and softer, and you guess that she is likely struggling with depression. You are careful not to sound too optimistic, and not too pessimistic. You suggest to her that perhaps she should wait then. Get to know him better, and then when she is sure, she can take the next step. But she is not convinced. She doesn’t know how to get to know him better, or when ‘better’ is enough. She’s afraid he will leave her because he won’t think she’s serious about him. You agree with her that it’s hard to know when ‘better’ is enough, and that yes, he might leave her. You tell her to set a timeline for herself, and to make her decision based on that, and not to make herself responsible for the outcome. It is hard, to learn the true nature of anything. The best she can do is prepare. 

Ryoga finds himself smiling. He knows, without looking in the mirror, that Ryoma would call this his bloodthirsty smile 

Preparation, huh.

Preparation is a big part of any tournament.

If this were a tennis match, he thought, how would he gauge hs opponent.

He reaches for his laptop, and types ‘hotlines in Tokyo’ into the search engine. 

If he were trying to gauge his opponent, he would play him. 

When he dials the number, and waits for it to connect, he tries not to think about how, if he were not hungover, he might not have done this. 

 

Syusuke loves afternoons like this. They curl hot on his face like a caress; they light every corner, show every fault, and bring to every shot a searing imperfection. This is why, when Shiraishi waves at him from across campus, as unconsciously enthusiastic as Toyama-kun, he forgoes his personal rule and takes a picture of him. 

He wonders what the person with his photojournal will think. If it is, as Syusuke suspects, someone who at least knows him, then such a picture would narrow down the list of potential owners significantly. 

“Fuji!” calls Shiraishi. He detaches himself from the girl at his side with a word, and runs across campus towards him. “What are you doing here?”

“I study here, Shiraishi.”

The man blinks, then smiles good-naturedly. “I know that. But it’s a weekend. You never come here on weekends. Have you joined a new club?”

“Something like that.”

“What is it this time?”

“Today, the Detective Conan club is having a mock mystery.”

Shiraishi’s smile widens. “I heard about that! Fuji, you could have asked me to do it with you. It sounds like fun.”

“Sorry. I asked Akise-kun. He’s fond of this kind of thing.”

“He is.”

There is a silence.

“How have you been, Fuji?”

“Good. Classes. You know.”

“Are you going to do another exhibition this year?”

He smiled. “No. I think I’m going to photograph for fun. Exhibitions are too much work.”

“But your shots are really good. You could go pro if you wanted to, I bet.”

“That’s nice of you to say.”

Another silence.

“Have you planned anything for Valentine’s Day.”

“That would spoil the surprise, Shiraishi.”

He laughed. “I’m not going to tell Tezuka.”

“What about you and Kenya? Anything in the works?”

“We were thinking about going back to Osaka for the weekend. Visit Coach and Kin-chan.”

“How is Kin-chan?”

“The usual. The shop is doing well. I never expected him to like baking so much, but I guess it explains the sweet tooth.”

“It does.”

Shiraishi ducks his head for a moment, and then looks up. “You know, Fuji,” he says. “Maybe you would like baking too.”

The implication hangs between them.

Fuji tilts his head, smiles. “Maybe. But I think I’ll stick to photography for now. And Detective Conan.” And drama, and cooking, and painting, and shogi, and poetry recitals. 

Shiraishi’s tone is sad. “Okay. Well, I’ll see you around then.”

“See you.”

He watches Shiraishi go. When he turns back around, Akise is waving at him. He’s got a racquet balanced on his shoulder. 

Fuji wonders how long it will take Ryoma to realise that it’s gone. 

 

“Echizen,” said Kunimitsu. “What are you doing? Practice is starting.”

He pulls his cap down. “Hm.”


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter Five

Rain. Blood. A grey sky and a grey road, stretching forever downwards even as his arms tire and his back gives out, and he can’t do this anymore, the body slips from his grasp and he falls down, and he looks up, and there’s nothing but an Infinite Deep.

He opens his eyes. 

The soft, smooth voice repeats the announcement in German. He only understands two words: Frankfurt and Eurostar. 

Next to him, the old lady has started to pack her book away. He pulls his bag up, does the same. When the doors open, he is one of the first on the platform. It stretches out on either side of him, grey asphalt and signs written in two languages. He follows the English ones to the exit. 

Outside the station, he hails a taxi. He has trouble pronouncing the name in his notebook, so he shows it to the driver, gets a thumbs-up. When he leans back, takes in his surroundings properly, he sees that the sky is grey. It looks like it’s going to rain. 

Coming here on a Saturday lowers the chance of his accomplishing his task. However, the conference starts tomorrow, and he must be back on the Eurostar by seven this evening. It takes three hours to get back to London, and another hour to return to Oxford. A five-hour window is better than nothing. 

The cab comes to a stop. He hands the driver the right amount of Euros, and gets out. He stares at the state-of-the-art training centre for a moment, watching two people in sports clothes, tennis bags slung over their shoulders, walk out the revolving doors. They are children, likely members of the junior team. Their seniors won’t have ended practice this early. They sense his gaze perhaps, because they look up. They don’t seem to feel threatened, only curious. He is carrying a tennis bag, after all.

He turns and walks away.

The centre is not his final destination. 

Three blocks away, he finds the street courts.

The place is lively on a Saturday evening. Families face off against each other; friends laugh as they lose and win; balls are out more often than they are in. He smiles as he watches a young boy, with more competence than most, defeat a friend in two straight sets. When he finds what he is looking for, on the last court in that small open-air complex, the smile turns a little sharp. 

“Hi,” he calls. He speaks with barely an accent now, but they look at him askance anyway. An English speaker in this middle-class suburb is almost as strange as a Japanese speaker. Ignoring this, he waves his racquet at them. “Game?”

Renji had been able to garner little about the dynamics within Tezuka’s German team. Such things did not really concern tennis journalists. Teams at the professional level were more of a resource-sharing function than an actual, tight-knit community. Nonetheless, he had fed a short German article into Google Translate, and learned that Tezuka Kunimitsu, the youngest Grand Slam winner ever, had been spotted practising here once. 

That Tezuka, who hated crowds and attention, had chosen to practise at a street court instead of his team’s more private facilities, suggested many things. 

Standing here now, watching as the world’s hundredth and ninety-seventh seed deliberated, he finds one such inference proved right. At least half of Tezuka’s team can’t stand each other’s company enough to practise together unless required to do so. 

One of the men nods at him. He approaches, drops his bag on the floor, and takes out his racquet. No one asks his name, and he doesn’t ask theirs. That will come later.

“Serve?” inquires the man.

He nods, and snatches the tossed ball out of the air. 

They look vaguely interested. 

Renji serves. 

He finds, as always, that practising against Seiichi and Genichirou was good for his game. 

“Alexis,” says the man later, in a slightly confounding accent. “Alexis Bauer.” He gestures at his friend. “This is Frej Drescher.”

“Renji Yanagi,” he says, taking the proffered hand. “Good game.”

Alexis’s eyebrows have risen. Frej’s face has darkened, and he looks away. “You are Japanese.”

“Yes.”

“We used to have a Japanese on our team. Maybe you know him. In your country, he is famous, yes?”

“I know him.”

“You know him?” presses Alexis. “You play very well. Maybe you are also pro? You are his friend?”

Frej says something sharp in German.

Alexis doesn’t reply.

Renji says, “I used to play with him in high school. We sometimes talk.”

“How is he doing? He did not play in many tournaments last year. We didn’t see him.”

“He’s doing well. I came here for a holiday, so I came to see his old team.”

“He didn’t ask you to, right?” snaps Frej. His English is better than Alexis’s. 

Renji shakes his head.

Alexis turns to his friend, and they engage in a rapidfire conversation. When he turns back, he smiles. “You want go for a drink?”

Frej doesn’t come with them. 

“You must not be angry at Frej,” Alexis tells him. “Things have been…hard this year. He and Kunimitsu were not friends, also.”

“Why not?”

Alexis’s smile is a little forced. “Competition. It is sometimes hard to be friends, when there is so much competition.” When he looks down at his glass of beer, smile slipping off completely, Renji suspects that there is something very significant about what he is saying. He just isn’t sure what.

“I heard about the accusations,” he offers. “I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to do with me,” says Alexis, too cheerfully. “Nothing to do with me. With the team, that is different story. But, nothing to do with me.”

“But it’s reflecting on all of you, right? That must be hard.”

“Thank you, it is, but it’s the team, not me, so it is okay. Is Kunimitsu playing this year? There is the Olympics, he must surely be playing in that.”

Soon, it is time for him to leave.

Alexis thanks him for his time, and invites him to another game. Renji promises to find him on Facebook. Just as he is about to get into the cab, Alexis says, “Tell Kunimitsu something, can you?”

He waits. 

“Tell him Adalbert is gone.” He pauses. “And that I am sorry. For not listening. Can you tell him that?”

He nods. 

“Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.”

There is wireless on the Eurostar, so he finds Alexis’s picture and adds him. He looks up the name Adalbert. Adalbert Keller. And then he closes his laptop, and looks out the window, just as the sky gives way to the black tunnel under the sea. 

 

“What do you think, Echizen.”

“Hm.”

“Hm?”

“It’s a photograph, Yukimura-senpai.”

“Ah.”

“Of a sky.”

“Ah. Tezuka?”

“You should ask Fuji.”

“I don’t really need any expertise on the subject.”

“Then, what do you need, Yukimura-senpai?”

He doesn’t really know. 

Echizen, bored of the topic already, turns to Tokugawa. “When did you perfect that move?”

Tokugawa take the phone from Seiichi, stares at the photo for a moment, and then flicks through the rest. His voice is slightly tense. “Where did you get this?”

“I found it.” It’s not really a lie. “It was unlocked, and I thought the photos might help me find the owner.”

“If there were pictures of people,” said Tezuka. “Or places. Or if he kept taking photos of the same thing. Echizen, you don’t need two shots of vodka.”

“They aren’t both for me.”

“Who else are they for?”

“Tokugawa-san, I bet I can drink this faster than you can.”

“Echizen, you are not doing this again.”

“Tezuka-senpai, it’s only one shot.”

“Ryoma, I’m not really in the mood.”

“Hm.”

“What?”

“You’re still scared.”

“Scared?”

“Because the last time…”

“Echizen.”

“I was just saying…”

Seiichi tunes them out. People. Places. Photos of the same thing. He flicks through the photos, noting absently the now-familiar series of sunsets, sunrises, interesting angles of light and shadow, flowers, animals, and Shiraishi.

Shiraishi. 

He pauses. A new shot. Of Shiraishi. Against a nondescript wall. At nine a.m., today. 

“I’m not scared, Ryoma!”

“Then drink it.”

There is a brief silence. And then Tokugawa pushes back his chair, and walks out. 

Tezuka says, “If someone doesn’t want to drink, Echizen, it is not your place to push it.”

Echizen’s mumbled retort is more for his own ears than general consumption. Still, Seiichi imagines it is something like, ‘it is, if they’re just using it to hide’. 

That, after all, is not something Echizen understands. 

And as such, their usual weekend drinks are cut short. 

“Tadaima,” he calls, toeing his shoes off and putting them on the rack. 

“Okaeri.” Genichirou is standing at the end of the hallway. He is wearing cheap, plastic gloves. And looks as if he’s been caught red-handed.

Seiichi smiles. “You didn’t.”

“I was going to,” he mutters. “Now I have to think of something else.”

“I thought it was my turn to do Valentine’s Day.”

“You’re busy.”

“I’ll be busier when White Day comes.”

Silence.

He touches Genichirou’s arm, kisses him softly. “Thank you.”

Genichirou leans into the kiss, deepening it. And then pulls away. “Don’t. I have to think of something else now. You came back too early.”

He is clearly irritated, so Seiichi says, “I’ll eat them now, and you can make another batch for next week. They are delicious no matter when you make them, anyway.”

So, Genichirou disappears back into the kitchen and Seiichi goes to change. When he comes back out, they are ready. Chocolate-coated balls of rice cereal, each in its own colourful paper cupcake liner, placed in three rows on a tray. 

He takes one, and bites into it with relish.

“As good as the first time.”

Genichirou frowns. “I hope not.”

“Better,” he promises. And then he laughs. “I still remember the first time, though.”

He expects silence, or embarassment, or a reciprocal smile. Instead, Genichirou is staring at him, hard. 

“I wasn’t supposed to give these to you,” he says, suddenly.

Seiichi stops mid-bite. “What?”

“That first time. I was going to take you a garden. A botanical garden. I talked to Renji and he suggested one.”

He forces himself to start chewing again. When he speaks, his voice is even. “Why didn’t you?”

“Renji…Renji got angry.”

“He got angry?” Renji never gets angry. At least, Seiichi can count the number of times he remembers him doing so on the fingers of one hand. 

“I asked him…” Genichirou’s dark skin is turning red. “To come with us.”

“And he got angry.” Seiichi has to process it. But when he does, he sighs. “Oh.”

“I didn’t know he would see it that way,” says Genichirou, defensively. “And even if he did, it wasn’t something to get angry about.”

“Well,” he says. “I don’t think I would’ve understood either.”

“But you do now.” How easily he hears the things Seiichi does not say. 

“I wonder,” he says. “If Renji still feels like that. Displaced.”

 

“We won,” says Syusuke, sprawled out on a bench. 

Akise hands him a can, perches himself on the bench’s green-painted arm. Ponta. Of course. “Who else?”

“You’re going to be a great detective.”

“So could you.”

He laughs. “I’m not interested enough.”

“You’re not interested in much, Fuji-san. I don’t think that’s much of a deterrent.”

“You don’t think I should keep looking until I find something.”

Akise shrugs, and doesn’t answer.

Syusuke sits up, and digs into his pocket. He produces the phone. “This is yours, I’m guessing.”

An amused glance. “I already have a phone, Fuji-san. You heard Ryoma talking to me on it earlier.”

“You can have more than one phone.”

“No, thanks. I don’t need more than one.”

“Akise-kun,” he says. “I know it’s yours.”

“And how do you know that?”

“It’s just like you.”

“How so?”

“A hunch.”

“I take it back, Fuji-san. You wouldn’t make a very good detective. You would have to explain more if you were one.”  
“Well,” says Syusuke. “That was never my objective.”

“Oh?” Akise brings his legs up onto the bench, props his elbows on his knees. “What was?”

“I just wanted to confirm it for myself. That you were the owner.”

“And did you?”

“Why,” he says. “Would you play such a game, Akise? Why is the ending such a strange one?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Is it to do with Ryoma?”

Akise’s expression doesn’t change. But Syusuke raises his camera, and snaps a shot anyway. “I thought you didn’t photograph people, Fuji-san.” There is an edge to his voice.

“No,” he says. He presses the button for ‘gallery’ and gestures for Akise to come closer. They both look at the picture, at how washed out Akise seems in the glare of the afternoon sun. At the flawed nonchalance in his eyes.

“That is a good shot.” There is a hint of wistfulness, in that tone.

“It’s the lighting,” Syusuke tells him. “Natural light. It brings out everyone’s eyes.”

“You are,” Akise says. “A lot more straightforward a person than I thought, Fuji-san.”

“Not really. I just like to do things my way.” He holds up the phone, closes down each diary and returns to the blank home page. The Infinite Deep jumps out at them, hard and angry on the screen.

As they watch, it grows lighter, turning the colour of a storm.


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter Six

It is four a.m.

He presses a kiss to Seiichi’s cheek, eliciting a mumble, and goes to shower. He meditates for half an hour, prepares a traditional breakfast for them both, and then seats himself on the balcony, waiting for the sun to rise. 

It is impossible to see it in Tokyo, of course. But it is a tradition, and his grandfather would have approved. He closes his eyes, inhales, exhales. The thoughts that he’d banished during his meditation return full force.

If Renji had felt out of place, why had he not said so?

That is what Genichirou does not understand.

If he’d said so, then maybe he and Seiichi would have seen the increasingly infrequent calls and texts, the refusals to come and see them or they to come and see him, the shortening list of things to talk about, for what they were. Maybe they would not have lost contact with each other. Maybe…he slams his fist on the table. The pain draws him back to himself. 

He is being remiss, in blaming Renji.

He is assuming that, had Renji not felt this way, they would not have drifted apart in the first place. That, he knows, is not true. 

Just as surely as Renji drew away from them, they’d drawn away from him; one unsure of his place, and the other two trying to find theirs, in a relationship they’d never experienced before. 

Had that been what happened last year, he wondered. Had Seiichi’s return, when he and Renji were newly re-connected through Keio, been too much of a shock, a threat to a newfound balance?

Perhaps. But, it doesn’t seem to fit. The second time Renji had drawn away, there was an urgency to his actions unrelated to the first. An urgency and violence noticeable enough for he and Seiichi to have realised it, to have tried to address it, only for all of it to explode in their faces. 

And it’d started before Seiichi returned.

He crosses his arms, drops his head. If Seiichi has always been the frustrating, brilliant one, then Renji has always been the most inscrutable. 

There is something glinting in the floor.

He picks it up, realises that it is the phone he and Seiichi got in the mail a few days ago, and blanches. But when he taps the screen, it lights up. At least, it doesn’t look broken.   
Leaning back, he pulls up the photojournal and skims through the photos again. Yesterday, he and Seiichi had spent hours musing over why the owner would have suddenly included pictures of two people in quick succession: Shiraishi and a vaguely familiar boy with white hair and red eyes.

They’d thought of everything from a life-changing event to the idea that perhaps the owner knew about the diaries, and was trying to throw them off-track. But, even if either were true, it brought them no closer to identifying him than they’d been before. 

Who, Seiichi had queried, viewed his life so impersonally that only two pictures out of a hundred were of things that were personal?

There is a new shot.

Of the night sky, dark and cold.

Genichirou looks out at his own patch of night, lets it sink into his bones, calming him. Sometimes, the silent vastness of it does more for his nerves than meditation has. 

It is calming. 

It is calming.

He holds the phone up, stares at the last shot. Then, he swipes the screen with his thumb, bringing him back to the first shot. Again of the sky, blue and crisp. Next: a flower, dew sliding down its petals, dripping onto the tiled floor. Each is still. Each is a moment of beauty, a moment like a thousand others, immortalised by their very impersonality. 

The night is turning silver, gleaming in the throes of its quiet death. 

Genichirou closes his eyes, and lets it calm him. 

 

“Hello,” he says into the receiver. “This is Listener 2232.”

“You changed places,” said the voice. 

“Caller-san. You’re calling again?”

“Isn’t that a mouthful? Are you not allowed to ask for my name?”

Kanata counts to ten. The man’s tone is intransigent, but if he needs help, then it is his job to listen. “We don’t presume that our callers want us to use their names.”

“Well, you can use mine. Takeda. What’s yours?”

“I’m sorry, Takeda-san. I’m not allowed to give you my name.”

The man is silent. Kanata can hear him breathing. He has slow, even breathing, and it occurs to him that maybe Takeda is an athlete, a good athlete, with a heart that beats only 49 times a minute. 

Or maybe he is just tired. 

“Why do you do this job, 2232-san?”

It is not the first time he has been asked this question. Perhaps, it is the first time he has been asked it so calmly. “I want to listen to people. Sometimes, people need to be listened to.”

“It doesn’t pay very well, does it. You’re probably a volunteer.”

He doesn’t answer. Takeda might have a particular aim in mind, for this conversation. He won’t disrupt it.

“Are you a volunteer?”

Or not. “Yes.”

“When did you start?”

“I’m sorry, Takeda-san. That’s personal information.”

A snort. “I didn’t know it was so impersonal, this whole hotline business.”

He doesn’t answer that either. Starting to get a sense of the man’s temper now, Kanata is afraid that either possible answer would only infuriate.

But, of course, not answering also infuriates. “Aren’t you supposed to get me to talk, or something? Don’t you have to recommend websites and support groups to me, so I can get better?”

“No,” he says. “Not unless you want me to.”

“Why would I call if I didn’t want you to?”

“Do you want me to, then, Takeda-san?”

“No.” He is angry, now. “I want a straight answer!”

“A straight answer. To what?”

“To everything!” The outburst seems to have scared Takeda too, because he falls silent. His breathing has quickened. Gradually, gradually, he slows it down. “Sometimes,” he says. “Sometimes, I don’t know.” 

Kanata treads carefully. “Don’t know what?”

“I don’t know!”

He falls back, falls silent.

“I don’t know,” repeats Takeda, more quietly. “I keep trying to do things, and, and none of it works out, and I keep…I keep losing.”

Suddenly, Kanata is reminded of Echizen. Of the look in his eyes, and the words in his diary, putting voice to too many emotions to name. 

He has stayed quiet too long. Takeda sighs. “Thank you. I’ll call again.”

“I hope,” he says, quickly. “That you keep trying, Takeda-san.”

A pause. And then a straggle of words, forced out. “If that’s true, do you mind if I keep calling, 2232-san?”

“Call whenever you want.”

The line goes dead. 

Kanata places the receiver back into its cradle. He sighs. Miyamura, a volunteer a year younger than him and his neighbour in this small, dim-lit room, says, “Difficult caller?”

“I don’t really know what he wants.”

“Stick it out. He’ll let it out sooner or later.”

He nods. He hopes so. Because when he talks to Takeda, he sometimes feels like he did with Kazuya, back at the U-17 camp. As though, if he were not careful, there was a whole person who could slip through his fingers.

 

In his own room, Ryoga watches the Emotion Diary summarise Irie’s thoughts into a few paragraphs, and groans. He buries his head into his pillow, and for a moment, he just breathes. 

Somehow, he’d screwed up again.

He doesn’t know how the hell he’s going to get anything out of Irie, at this rate. If the conversation keeps turning to him and his bloody problems, how the hell was he supposed to?

No, he makes himself admit. No, he’s simplifying the problem. It is his own anger that turns the spotlight on him. His inability to control himself, his inability to stay calm, because his head is just a whirl of emotions and this cold, persistent fear, and…He bashes his head into the pillow.

He has to get a grip.

It’s just one setback.

He’s had a thousand setbacks. 

He’ll just read the entries again. Yes. If he does that, maybe something new will come to light. And if that doesn’t work, then tomorrow he will do his best to have a civil conversation with Kazuya, and maybe that will get him somewhere. Yes.

Still, it takes him a moment to pull his head out of his pillow.

The air-conditioned air is cold. The air-conditioned air is why, when he touches his face, his skin is clammy. 

 

When Syusuke opens his eyes, Tezuka is watching him. 

The blinds have been pulled up, the light a foolproof way to wake him. 

“What’s the occasion?” he inquires.

“Play a game with me.”

He sits up, pushes the blankets back. His leg doesn’t hurt today. It should be alright. “Do you have a new move in mind?”

“I’ve prepared breakfast. Once you’ve eaten, we can leave.”

“Yes,” he laughs. “Yes, captain.”

Tezuka’s shoulders stiffen. He leaves the room. 

Syusuke touches his leg. It should be alright. 

The complex they live in has its own tennis court. This early in the morning, there is no one else about. The empty green, the cool spring air, it takes Syusuke back so many years. He stretches, looks at Tezuka. “Laps?”

If Tezuka were an anime character, his eyebrows would be twitching. “Warm up.”

They both know that Syusuke can’t do laps. Not do them and play a game too.

The stretches aren’t too difficult today. His muscles don’t protest. 

He takes a ball from his pocket. “One game?”

Tezuka slips into receiving stance. 

Syusuke serves. 

And Tezuka, as they both knew, wins.

“Does your leg hurt?” he asks later, handing him a drink. It is not Ponta, but water. The difference makes him want to laugh. 

“No. Not today.”

Tezuka drinks his water. 

“What was this about?”

Silence.

Syusuke puts down his bottle, places a hand on Tezuka’s cheek, and turns him so that they are facing each other. “Is something wrong?”

His eyes are like a rock’s. But there are cracks in rocks. Moss and lichen grows on rocks. Sometimes, mushrooms do too. 

“You never asked me,” says Tezuka. “Why I left Germany.”

The question isn’t unexpected. He and Tezuka have always been too close, too involved to be cut out of parts of each other’s lives. They have their secrets, their locked boxes, and at the start, the silent agreement was not to mention them. But it’s hard to keep walking around and around a box and not want to know what is inside. It’s hard to pretend there isn’t something in the middle, when you reach over and take someone’s hand. 

The question isn’t unexpected, but Syusuke isn’t ready.

He’s still too tired. He’s still too sad.

And so he says, “You never asked me, why I stopped playing.”

When he withdraws his hand, Tezuka doesn’t object. He does say, “I’m going to Osaka tomorrow.”

“What do you have to do there?”

“There’s someone I’m meeting.”

Syusuke tilts his head. “Anyone I know?”

“No.” Tezuka hesitates. It’s the hesitation that gives him away, like a key to a box, waved in his face. “His name is Adalbert. Adalbert Keller.”


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter Seven

Plants are calming. That, Seiichi will attest to. Plants are one’s best companions if one wishes to take a nap. 

But why would a person want to keep photos of plants? You might as well plant them. 

“Good afternoon.”

He snaps his head around. 

Fuji laughs. “Olympic-level reflexes, I see.”

Alarmed, he shushes him. “Some of the university tennis players stayed back after practice to watch the tests,” he whispers. “And they keep looking at me.”

Nodding, Fuji puts his finger over his lips. He sits down next to Seiichi, rummages around in his bag, and takes out his camera. “I didn’t know you were interested in kendo, Yukimura.”

He shrugs. “Genichirou is taking his fourth dan test.”

“Fourth dan. That’s amazing.”

“It is,” he agrees. “Are you here for someone, too?”

“The school newspaper was short a photographer, so I’m helping out.”

“Is that yours, then?” He gestured at the camera.

“No, unfortunately. The quality is lacking.”

The camera looks like one of those professional types, bulky and consisting of multiple finicky parts. Seiichi frowns. “What is a good quality one?”

“It’s not that it’s not good quality,” Fuji says. “It’s just that it’s a commercial Nikon. Okada and I have strong opinions about commercial Nikon cameras.”

“Okada?” The name sounds familiar. Okada. Okada-san. 

“He’s the student…”

“Renji’s boyfriend,” Seiichi blurts out.

Fuji stares at him. Then, he says, “Okada is straight. He has a girlfriend, a chemistry major called Yumiko. I think you mean another Okada.”

Renji would reprimand him for jumping to conclusions. “Sorry. You’re right. It’s another Okada.”

But Fuji doesn’t seem to think the topic closed. He is staring thoughtfully at his camera. Abruptly, he smiles. “Interesting.”

“What?”

“It’s nothing, really. Just, Yanagi and I used to revise together in second year, and I remember, we had this conversation once, about which samurai we liked the best. Mine was Tokugawa Ieyasu, and Yanagi’s was Okada Izo.” Fuji chuckles. “Such a coincidence.”

He is jumping to conclusions again. That is what Renji would say. But Seiichi knows better. Seiichi knows, in his gut, that he is right. He does not say this to Fuji. To Fuji, he says, “It is.”

“Look, it’s Sanada’s turn.”

Fuji snaps his pictures, and Seiichi forces himself to think of plants until he’s calmed down. 

 

Kazuya hasn’t played against a wall for a long time. 

Not since high school, when Kanata used to come over after school and help him train for the U-17 camp. Not since university, when he moved to Tokyo and Ryoma sought him out to play matches. Not since he and Kanata pulled Ryoga out of a bar, at much damage to themselves and to Kanata’s apartment, and they became friends. 

If those thoughts make him hit the ball harder than usual, all the better for his training. 

“Tokugawa-san.”

He catches the ball in his hand. Turns. “What are you doing here, Ryoma?”

The boy tugs at his cap. “You’re still mad.”

Kazuya stares at him. He almost wants to smile. Ryoma and Ryoga really are nothing alike. When he speaks, his tone is reluctantly warmer. “Are you here to see Ryoga?”

“Nii-san isn’t answering his phone.” Again, was the unsaid addition. 

“He’s probably practising somewhere. I’ll talk to him about it tonight.”

“If you’re still talking.”

Kazuya tucks the tennis ball back into his pocket. “If we are.”

Ryoma’s gaze has always been more expressive than he would have liked. “Let’s play a game, Tokugawa-san.”

It’s better than a wall. 

At six games to four, the two of them sit at the side of the court, too tired to move. Kazuya lets the exhaustion sink into every limb, revels in the relieving blankness of his mind. “You’ve gotten better,” he says. “You could probably beat Ryoga if you kept this up.”

“I will beat nii-san,” corrects Ryoma. 

Kazuya smiles. “One day,” he agrees. 

“Explain something to me, Tokugawa-san.”

Ryoma’s raised enough tennis courage, then. He closes his eyes. “And what is that.”

“I thought you liked my brother.”

His eyes open. “What?”

“You’ve liked him for years. Since before you and Irie-san started going out. Right?”

He doesn’t know what to say.

“It was kind of obvious.” Ryoma takes off his cap, waves it in the air, an attempt at cooling it down after contact with his head for the better part of a strenuous hour. “Irie-san probably knew too.”

“Kanata?”

“So,” Ryoma says. “Isn’t it like, things have come full-circle.”

“Kanata knew I…liked Ryoga?”

“The only one who didn’t know was nii-san.”

Ryoma hops to his feet. Perhaps, the energy comes from his desire to escape his older brother’s love life. 

“Ryoma,” he says. “Thank you. For trying.”

The boy just looks uncomfortable. Slinging his bag over his shoulder, he vaults over the railings separating the tennis court from the pavement, and continues along his way. The empty Sunday afternoon beats down upon both their heads. 

 

“Bert,” said the girl. “I want double scoop, large.”

“No way. You’ll get fat. Mum would kill me.”

“You said I could choose if I won!”

“You haven’t won yet.”

“But I will.” When the girl smiles, Kunimitsu is reminded of Echizen. The thought, the clashing of two worlds, freezes him in place. When she turns, fixes him with an Echizen-like eye, he does not have the presence of mind to look away.

Her brother follows her gaze. The look on his face helps Kunimitsu relax. Adalbert Keller, at least, is firmly classifiable. 

“Bert?”

“Hello,” says Kunimitsu, in German.

The girl stares at him for a moment. Her mouth falls open. “You’re Tezuka! Tezuka Kunimitsu, oh my god, you’re Tezuka.”

He nods. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“I’ve watched all your matches. I think you’re awesome. I mean, everyone thinks you’re awesome.” Not exactly like Echizen, then. Embarassed at meeting him, embrassed at her own indignity, she has turned a bright red to match her hair. 

“What are you doing here,” snarls her brother. 

“I live here.”

“You live in Tokyo.”

“We’re here for a tournament,” says the girl. “My tournament, I mean. It’s just an invitational, but it’s, um, are you here to watch? The tournament. Of course not, you’ve got plenty of better things to do…”

“To be part of an invitational team is an achievement,” he tells her. “Congratulations, and good luck. I don’t have a ticket, or I would come and watch. I’m here to see your brother.”

Adalbert has turned white. His skin is the colour of paper. “I don’t have anything to say to you.”

Kunimitsu looks at him. He doesn’t know why he was ever afraid of this person. A traitorous part of him asks why he still is. He suppresses that in favour of indifference. “Neither do I. Play a game with me, Adalbert.”

The girl’s eyes widen. “Oh my god. Oh my god.” 

Her brother says, “No way in hell.”

Kunimitsu removes his racquet from his bag. “I heard about the accusations.”  
It’s his sister’s face that hardens. “Those aren’t true,” she says. “They’re not true at all. I don’t know what you’ve heard, Mr Tezuka, but those reporters are lying. My brother would never, never do that, and…”

“What about them?” hisses Adalbert. “They have nothing to do with you.” He takes a step towards him, menacing, and Kunimitsu has to force himself to stay in place. His own cowardice eats at him, but he won’t listen to it. He has to do this. He has to prove Yanagi wrong. He has to prove, to himself, that he was wrong. 

“Play a game with me, Adalbert. And I promise it will have nothing to do with me.”

He wishes the girl wasn’t there. Her presence is making his head spin. “Bert,” she says. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” says her brother, although sweat has appeared on his white skin. “I suppose you have an extra racquet.”

He nods.

“Greta, you know the way back to the hotel.”

She shakes her head. “I’m coming.”

“Go back.”

“Bert!”

“Go back.” He takes her by the shoulders, crouches down to her level. The close contact makes Kunimitsu want to flinch, brings bile up into his mouth. He barely remembers not to shut his eyes. “I’ll come check on you in an hour.”

“But I want…” At her brother’s scowl, she trails off into a sulky silence. “Fine. It was nice to meet you, Mr Tezuka. Good luck in the Olympics, but Germany is going to win.”

“Thank you. Greta.”

He and Adalbert walk to the nearest street court in silence. 

“We play this game,” says Adalbert, closing a trembling fist over the ball. “And you shut up. Forever.”

“Yes.”

The match takes less than an hour. 

One-zero.

Two-zero.

Three-zero. 

Adalbert tosses the racquet across the court. “You know who’s going to win,” he bellows. “What’s the fucking point!”

He walks up to the net, picks up the racquet. Holds it out. “One match,” he says. 

Four-zero. 

Face red with sweat and anger. Breathing heavily. It reminds Kunimitsu of things he’d rather forget, and he smashes the next ball into the court so hard that it leaves burn marks on the green. 

Five-zero. 

Six-zero. 

The last ball drops, and Kunimitsu watches it roll back from the wall, coming to a stop just outside the baseline. He feels nothing. He feels numb. 

Adalbert drops down where he is standing. He is still panting, unable to speak. 

Kunimitsu packs away his racquet. Slings it onto his shoulder, and starts to walk away. He has left his other racquet behind, but he doesn’t think he could touch it, now. He would have to wash his hands afterwards. He would have to go onto the court, and be plagued by memories of drunken breath, and bodies crowding him against a wall, and that ugly voice, one of many ugly voices; mocking him whilst its owner forces his hand to close around the pulsing heat in his pants. 

“Tezuka!”

He stops. But he won’t turn around. 

“I don’t know what the bloody hell you want, but you know what? You’re not going to tell anyone! You’re a coward, you’re too much of a coward, you’re the one who’ll be embarassed, you know. You’re the one who’s gonna be humiliated!” 

He starts walking again. 

“I’m not afraid of you, Tezuka! I’m not, not afraid of you.”

He doesn’t stop.


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter Eight

Rain. Blood. A grey sky and a grey road, stretching forever downwards even as he is drenched to the bone and water clouds his eyes, and he can’t stop thinking about it, the body lying in the woods, bloodied and broken and defenceless, and he looks up, and there’s nothing but an endless deep.

He tears at the sky, forces himself free of it and into the darkness of the half-awakened. The room is hot, and the sheets are heavy on him. 

Sun. Cool. A hand in his that does not move, bloated by the years of inertia, and eyes that rove wildly, lost in the madness of the imprisoned. The sun presses, presses, presses through the window, and he cannot move, cannot shield the mad man from its dead glare.

He turns away, he reaches, reaches for the door, and it opens into the air-conditioned cold of his room. His head moves from side to side, but his arms are trapped by the blanket.

Winter. Streetlight. Hand stretched out, voice ripped from his throat, heart frozen. The headlights grow stronger, and the man stands there, strong and unmoving as a rock, but the metal crunches into him like an apple; muscles tear and bones crack, and he has to wake up.

He sits up. His breath leaves him in gasps. For a moment, that is all he can hear. And then, the doorbell tinkles once more, a clear, sweet sound. Renji wipes at the sweat on his neck. Economically, he turns his arm up and brushes away the tears with the back of his hand. 

 

It’s eleven a.m. 

Seiichi checks his watch, affirms that for the third time. Renji should be up by now. Of course, he could be out. Genichirou had told him humanities lectures didn’t start until twelve, but this was Renji. Likely, he’d gone early to go to the library, jet lag be damned. That would explain why he wasn’t answering his phone, anyway. It was probably on silent. 

And Seiichi, like an idiot, had decided vengeance didn’t need an appointment. 

One more time, he thought. He pressed the doorbell again. 

The hands on his watch crawl to eleven oh one.

Oh two.

Oh three.

The door opens. Renji is dressed in a fresh shirt and shorts. Seiichi knows this because they are not crinkled, and they still smell of that flowery detergent that Renji’s mother likes to use. 

He wonders why Renji had felt the need to change. 

“Sorry,” he says. “I overslept.”

His face lacks the surprise Seiichi had expected. But then, Renji would have checked the camera before opening the door. The caution in his tone suggests surprise enough.

“That’s okay. I should have called.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Renji is surprised. It takes him a second to remember his manners. “Come in. I’ll get you some tea.”

“Thanks.”

The first thing Seiichi notices is the sheer amount of books. He and Genichirou don’t read much between them. Except for a few tomes of Japanese history, magazines on tennis and kendo, and a thin volume on teaching beginners in martial arts, their shelves are taken up by trophies, pictures, and plants. 

Renji’s trophies, pictures, and plants hover at the edges of the room, on windowsills and the end of shelves. Some sit on top of stacks of books, relegated to the corners of the living room by a sheer lack of space. 

This sight, as much as Renji’s flower-smelling clothes and wary demeanour, douses his anger somewhat. 

He almost doesn’t want to ask. 

But Seiichi has never backed down from a challenge. This, he tells himself grimly, is a challenge. 

Renji returns with two cups of tea. He accepts his with thanks, inhales the crushed leaf scent of jasmine. Renji watches him, more openly than usual, and with a certain blankness that hints at exhaustion. It is as if he’s not slept. Perhaps, he is still suffering from jetlag. 

“Did you want something, Seiichi?” he inquires.

He puts the cup down, leans back in his chair. His elbows are propped up on each arm of the couch. He clasps his hands together, looks at them for a moment. And then he says, “I was talking to Fuji about Okada-san the day before.”

The speed at which Renji’s mind works has always amazed him. Genichirou told him once that when he’d first met Renji, he’d been repulsed by it. Somehow, he’d said, it made Renji seem less human.

But Seiichi has always been drawn to inhuman things. 

Despite himself, despite the fact that it has nothing to do with tennis, he feels a thrill when Renji smiles, and leans back too. The smile is resigned. 

“Do you remember,” Seiichi says. “The time when I fell asleep on the roof, and you and Genichirou had to come and get me?”

“The leadership camp,” Renji says. “Yes, I remember.”

“Honjo-sensei was angry with us, and you made up an excuse. You said…”

“That we’d been helping two senpai from the high school division move a really heavy table.”

“And she might have had to accept that, names or not, because there’s no way she could’ve known who those senpai were, except that…”

“The names I gave were Ryu-senpai and Lilly-senpai.”

Seiichi shook his head. “I don’t know what made her angrier, that you lied to her, or that you’d been reading a book about sex and drugs.”

“A best-selling, award-winning work of literature. Honjo-sensei did tell me to branch out more in my leisure reading.”

He smiles. “You were always such a bad liar.”

“No,” Renji says. “I was always a bad spontaneous liar.”

“Why did you lie?”

There is a monent’s silence. “I don’t know, Seiichi.”

“Why did you continue lying?”

“It was easier.”

“Easier.”

“I couldn’t keep telling you that I had schoolwork. I had to have another excuse.”

“You made up a boyfriend, just to get Genichirou and me to stop pestering you.”

“It wasn’t pestering, Seiichi.”

He keeps his voice calm. “It seems like you felt that way.”

Renji sighs. 

“You’re not denying it.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Say what it was, if it wasn’t pestering.”

“It wasn’t your fault. Yours or Genichirou’s. I just…needed some time to myself.”

“You wouldn’t see us for a month. You never picked up your calls. Genichirou says you went the other way when you saw him on campus.”

“I can’t talk to you about this, Seiichi.”

“Why not?”

He is tapping his fingers on the arm of the sofa. It reminds Seiichi of that time last year, in the winter cold, standing on the street and watching Renji, arms crossed, tap-tap-tapping his fingers against his shoulder as he refused, refused, to meet their eyes. 

“There are things…that I want to sort out for myself.”

Seiichi keeps his voice soft. “Let me help you.”

Renji seems to find this amusing, in a tired way. “Thank you, Seiichi, but you can’t. I’m sorry for lying to you. And to Genichirou. It’s nothing important, and it’s nothing that you need to be concerned about.” 

He looks away from Seiichi then, towards the books. The rows and rows of books. They seem to calm him. When he turns back, his fingers have stopped tapping the sofa. “I won’t do it again.”

Seiichi wants to stand up. He wants to shout. He wants to demand an explanation, a concrete reason why Renji is looking at him as if there is a glass wall between them. He came here to answer a challenge; he has never backed down from one before. 

But Renji has turned the tables. He’s capitulated, he’s apologised, and he’s left the opposing court; he’s walked away. 

Without an opponent, Seiichi has nothing to defeat.

 

I had a nightmare.

Kazuya eyes this sentence as he bites into his sandwich. This statement, and all the others like it, are the only ones that Yanagi does not comment or expand upon. They seem to have no analytical use. They are part of no data collection. 

It’s something, he supposes. But nothing is a hard something to work with. 

“What are you doing?”

He looks up. Ryoga is standing before him, sandwich pack in hand. His face is impassive, but his stillness is telling in itself. 

“What do you want?”

“I’m just eating lunch.”

Kazuya glances about the roof. Considering the number of people to whom this sports complex is open to, and the much more comfortable cafes and snack joints available downstairs, it is nearly empty. “You don’t have to eat it here.”

“Is it a crime to eat it here?”

The two other people who are here are watching. He counts to ten, like Kanata taught him. “No.”

Ryoga sits down. Kazuya slips Yanagi’s diary back into his pocket. They chew. Ryoga chews quietly, and it reminds Kazuya to chew with his own mouth closed. 

“How’s Irie doing, then.”

He doesn’t respond at first. He’s not entirely sure that Ryoga has the balls to…

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes,” he grits out. “Yes, I did.”

“Well? How’s he doing.”

“Why is it your business?”

“I was just asking. It was just a question.”

“It’s a weird question.”

“It’s not.”

“Why,” he says. “Would you be asking about a guy you screwed over?”

Ryoga’s glare is electric. He’s forgotten what it was like, to have that anger turned on him in full force. “You screwed him over, too.”

He did, but he’s not going to admit it. He won’t. He can’t. “I was drunk,” he hisses. “You took advantage, you bastard.”

Ryoga’s grin is like a wolf’s. “I was drunk too.”

“You kept asking and asking, and I kept saying no, and then, when I was drunk, you…”

“I was joking. It was a joke. S’far as I remember it, you were the one with the excited dick.”

The two other people on the roof are really staring now.

“I had a boyfriend,” he snaps. “Some joke.”

“Maybe,” Ryoga says. “Maybe I just thought it was funny, that my best friend had the hots for me. Maybe I just liked messing with you.”

He hurts. He hurts, and he doesn’t know if it’s because Ryoga called him his best friend, or because he said it was funny, or because Kazuya had had the hots for him, and maybe, Ryoma was right and he was the one cheating on Kanata all this time. Maybe he’d been the one treating Kanata like some rebound from some chick-lit, futile, unreciprocated love.

“Maybe,” he snaps. “You were just acting like your usual whore self.”

Ryoga crushes his sandwich packet in his fist. “What did you say?”

“Ryuzaki-san was right,” he says. “I always thought she was a little off the deep end with all her suspicions, but you know what? She was right. If you were that bloody willing to do your pathetic best friend, who knows who else you’ve screwed?”

“I didn’t,” Ryoga says. His voice is strained. “I’ve never screwed around.”

Incredulity makes him laugh out loud. “We’ve been friends for five years, Ryoga. In that time, I know you’ve slept with at least twenty different people.” 

“I was dating them.”

“You were dating them to sleep with them.”

Ryoga stands up. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Neither do you!”

They stare at each other. Reflected in Ryoga’s eyes, Kazuya sees the triumphant, twisted face of a stranger. 

“You didn’t have to tell him,” Ryoga says. 

“Of course I did.”

“If it was just me screwing around, you didn’t have to tell him.”

He shakes his head. “It doesn’t make any difference.”

“You aren’t that honest, Kazuya. Don’t give me that I-never-lie-to-my-partner shit. You told him for a reason.”

“And what,” he says, coldly. “Is that?”

“Because you liked me.”

How quiet Ryoga’s voice is, like the breeze. “And I knew. I think I always knew.”

 

“Fuji, that’s dangerous.”

Syusuke twists around, smiles. “Tadaima. You’re home earlier than I thought.”

Tezuka drops his tennis bag onto the floor, comes and slips his hands around Syusuke’s waist, holding him in place. “What are you doing?”

Anchored, Syusuke leans further out the window, craning his neck at an awkward angle. The camera’s strap is looped around his neck, but he still has that unshakeable feeling that he is going to drop it. 

Up close, the little flowers on the trellis are a brilliant pink. 

“Okay,” he says. “I’m done.”

Tezuka helps pull him up. Fuji, leaning against the sill, shows him the picture.

“It’s good. But you should be more careful.”

“That’s what I have you for.”

He wasn’t expecting a smile, but the sobriety of Tezuka's gaze is unsettling. He has been strange, since he came back from Osaka. Syusuke looked up Adalbert Keller, while Tezuka was away. 

He thinks Tezuka is waiting for him to ask. 

He knows he should ask. 

“I made dinner,” he says. “Sushi.”

“Is the wasabi separate?”

“You insisted, so yes.”

“Thank you.”

“Go wash up. I’ll set the table.”

“Thank you.” He touches Fuji’s hand, picks up his bag, and disappears down the corridor. A door opens, and shuts. 

Fuji looks at the photograph. The flowers are a brilliant pink, and they calm him. He breathes in, breathes out. Closes his eyes. 

Can someone really save him, he wonders.

Can someone look at his photos, see something he hasn’t seen, see right into his soul, and somehow, take this one right gesture to save him?

He digs his phone out of his pocket, switches on the Bluetooth. It links up automatically with his phone, and a window appears, asking him if he wants to align his photo galleries.

He pauses. Cancels the window. 

Instead, he accesses his gallery, scrolls through the photos until he’s reached the second-last one. A shot of the sunny sidewalk he’d taken yesterday, when he was walking back from the supermarket. 

His thumb presses down on the ‘delete’ button. And again. And again. And again, until his gallery is empty. 

“Fuji?” Tezuka has changed. His hair is wet from the shower. Syusuke hadn’t even heard him come out of their room. 

He smiles. “Sorry. I’ll set the table now, shall I?”


	9. Chapter 9

Chapter Nine

“Game and the match, Echizen.”

Genichirou, standing at the top of the bleachers, blinks. Not because Seiichi lost, but because Echizen doesn’t look at all happy about winning. His expression is sour, and he ignores Seiichi’s hand when he holds it out for a shake. 

The coach gathers together the whole team, and speaks a few words to them, too softly for him to catch. Once they are dismissed, Echizen speaks a few of his own words to Seiichi, and then departs. Seiichi looks after him, a somewhat dry smile on his face. 

“What was that about?” Genichirou asks, when Echizen passes by him on his way to the doors. 

“Tell your boyfriend to play me properly. He already missed the first half of practice.”

Tezuka nods to him, but says nothing. He seems preoccupied. Tokugawa and Echizen Ryoga don’t even do that. They are rather focused on avoiding each other, whilst competing to not be the last one to leave. This, of course, means that they collide at the doors, stare at each other for a moment, have a silent war of gazes, and then Echizen Ryoga reluctantly lets him go first. 

Seiichi taps him on the shoulder. “What are you doing here?”

He holds out the tickets. 

“Ah, I almost forgot.”

“You were the one who wanted to watch this.”

“Shingeki no Kyojin on the big screen, Genichirou. Who wouldn’t?”

“You lost to Echizen.”

“He’s gotten better.”

“You weren’t playing properly.”

That dry smile is back again. It reminds Genichirou of long days in hospital, when the three of them had tried very hard not to talk about illnesses at all. “What’s wrong?” he asks. He grips Seiichi’s arm too tightly. 

Seiichi’s smile grows gentle. “I’m fine. I just…went to see Renji today.”

He stares. They haven’t sought out Renji since last year. It’d seemed better, to allow him to dictate when they should meet. 

“He doesn’t have a boyfriend, Genichirou. He never did.”

Seiichi doesn’t say anything else on the subject, even after they’ve sat down to dinner. He knows that Genichirou needs to absorb the information, and gives him the necessary space. Instead, they talk about the photojournal.

“There was an update this morning,” he says, showing the picture to him. “Pink morning glory. It’s too close up to know if it’s high up on a wall, or on a fence or whatever. Not very informative. The weird thing is, that there’s been no other updates all day.”

“Maybe the photographer was busy.”

“I doubt it. He updates at least four times a day, no matter what day. I think he knows about it. The photojournal.”

“We are at a dead end if he doesn’t update.”

“Well,” says Seiichi. “We know he knows Shiraishi. He, or she, I suppose, is likely a Keio student or teacher. He knows a boy with white hair and red eyes, who we both think is kind of familiar. Maybe he has the same vague network of friends as us. What we both believe, is that the photos are meant to be calming. Perhaps he has something on his mind. Or he has a mental illness of some kind.”

“You’re jumping to conclusions.”

That dry smile again. “And what percentage chance is it that I’m right?”

Genichirou says nothing. 

Seiichi places a hand on his, as close to an apology as he will get, and motions for the waiter to come and take their orders. 

Once he’s left, Genichirou forces himself to ask the question. “What did Renji say?”

“He said it was a good excuse.”

He wants to say, he could have just said he didn’t want to meet us. But he remembers how persistent he and Seiichi had been, so afraid of Renji’s sudden silence that they’d chased after him on a wintry street, and Genichirou had not bothered to look both ways before crossing. 

He still remembers how it felt, to see the stricken fear in Renji’s eyes, like a wound reopened. To see it, and to be pushed away when he tried to come closer. He’d never heard Renji shout before. 

“Sometimes,” Seiichi says. “I feel like we’ve missed something. Or that Renji’s missed something, or at some point, we stopped being on the same side of the road and the pedestrian light, it’s just not turning green, you know.”

He picks up the phone, turns it carelessly in his hands. “I wish this was Renji’s photojournal. Or his journal. Maybe, if we knew what he was thinking…”

“No,” Genichirou says. His own voice surprises him. “I don’t think it would work, if we had Renji’s journal. We’re too close to the problem. We’re not on the same side of the problem.”

Seiichi smiles. “You’re right. We didn’t even think it was suspicious, this Okada-san he never talked about.” 

He tosses the phone into the air. Sensing that he doesn’t mean to catch it, Genichirou snaps his hand out and catches it himself.

“I guess,” says Seiichi. “There are some things we would refuse to see.”

 

“Takeda-san, it’s nice to hear from you again.”

“Is it?” says the man. “I would think it was annoying. This person calling, who’s not clinically depressed or suffering from an abusive relationship.”

“Sometimes,” Kanata says, for what seems like the seventh time. “People just need to be listened to, no matter what the problem.”

“So you’ll listen to anything.” Takeda sounds bemused. “Anything at all.”

“Anything.”

“What if I tried to phone-sex you?”

Count to ten. “I would recommend that you desist. If you continued to be a deliberate discomfort to me, I would redirect you to another listener.”

“So volunteers have human rights too.”

He doesn’t reply to that. 

“Let’s have an argument, 2232-san.”

“I would rather not.”

“No, really. I’ll call you names, and you can call me names, and then maybe we’ll be even.”

“There is nothing that we need to be even about.”

“Here, I’ll start. I think you’re a pushover.”

He is silent.   
“I mean, you’re probably the type of optimistic guy who thinks there’re stages to a relationship, you know, and if you just act accordingly, everything will turn out okay.”

Kanata’s fingers tighten on the receiver.

“I think you’re a clown. You like to pretend everything’s okay, because you want to make other people feel okay, but you know what?” His voice is shaking. “It just makes everyone feel worse.”

“Kids hate clowns. They hate clowns, you know.”

Kanata bites down on his lip. 

“This is supposed to be a two-way thing.”

He bites down harder. 

“Here, I’ll help you. My friend called me one today. A whore.”

“I think,” Kanata says, suddenly. “That’s not very accurate.”

A stunned silence. Laughter. “How would you know?”

“I don’t. I can just think of more accurate ones. You’re a pushover too. You’re more of a clown than I am.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Not many people would let someone else call them a whore.”

“What if it was true?”

Kanata keeps his voice calm. “If you are accepting money for sex, that means you’re a prostitute. Not a whore.”

“So let me get this straight. You don’t think whores exist.”

“I never said that. I just said, there’s a difference between being one, and letting people call you one.”

“You let me call you a pushover. And a clown.”

“I’m listening. If I kept talking, that wouldn’t be listening.”

“You’re talking, now.”

“Well,” says Kanata. “It’s not a hard-and-fast rule.”

Takeda laughs again. He sounds sad. “Why are you standing up for me?”  
“Sometimes,” he says. “That’s what listening does to you. Has this friend ever listened to you?”

“Sometimes. Not much, recently. Not,” he hastens to add. “That it’s his fault. It’s more…mine.”

There is a pause. “2232-san, do you hate it when I call you?”

“I can’t hate anything. I’m just listening.”

“I think I’m starting to be able to tell, when you’re gritting your teeth.”

Kanata relaxes his jaw. 

“Hey, you said I was a clown too. How did you figure that?”

“Just from talking to you.”

A ruefulness enters his tone. “Other people don’t. Maybe you’re just special.”

He is anything but special. “It’s easier, for people who are further removed from the problem, to see some things.”

“Then, how does anyone solve their own problems?”

He pauses. He’s never thought about it that way. “I guess, they have to remove themselves.”

“I see. Thank you.” A pause. “Thank you for listening, 2232-san.”

There is a click, and a long, long beep. 

“You seemed quite fired up,” Miyamura says. 

“You know,” Kanata says. “How they told us in the training sessions that everyone is coming from somewhere, and that for us to be non-judgemental, we have to recognise that?”

“What about it?”

“They never told us that even if they are coming from somewhere else, the view’s actually pretty similar.”

 

“No camera, today.”

Syusuke does not open his eyes. In the distance, he can hear the yells of the coach and the sound of a ball swishing into the net. Here, on the bleachers, the night cold aroud him, it is almost quiet. “No,” he says. 

He feels someone settle down next to him; the unmistakeable heat of another body. “You’re being childish, Fuji-san.”

“Am I.”

“It took a long time to connect your journal to the phone, you know.”

“And you didn’t think to connect my camera to it.”

“It is connected, but that makes no difference if you aren’t going to take photographs.”

“If whoever it is, is so uniquely suited to solve my problems, he’ll figure it out anyway.”

Akise snorts. 

Syusuke opens his eyes. “How did you know I was here?”

“I called your flat, and Tezuka-san said that you’d gone out. This is your old school, isn’t it. More well known for soccer than for tennis now.”

“Night practices,” Syusuke agrees. “We were never that dedicated. Well, I wasn’t. They’re going to nationals this year, for the second time in a row. I hear they have a first-year ace.”

“And how would you know that?”

“Eiji is a good coach.”

“Ah. Ryoma said he turned to soccer in high school.”

“But you didn’t know he was coaching here.”

“Only some of Ryoma’s friends interest me.”

He sits up properly, smiles at Akise. “And what about them interests you?”

Akise smiles back, says nothing. 

“I like my life, Akise-kun.”

“Is that why you ran away?”

“I didn’t run away.”

“If you say so.”

Syusuke hates to be baited. His smiles sharpens. “But perhaps you are running away.”

But the boy’s tone is light. “Perhaps I am. Will you save me, Fuji-san?”

The ball swishes into the net a second time. Eiji’s voice rises into the stands, as excited as it was the first time he and Oishi won a match together. There are some people, Syusuke thinks, who will never change. 

“I don’t know if I can save anyone, Akise-kun.”

“Then,” says Akise. “Will you help me?”


	10. Chapter 10

Chapter Ten

The nursery is a large, spherical building just outside Tokyo. Light streams into it from the floor-to-ceiling windows, glinting off the pots and plants of every possible size and colour. Tezuka almost regrets coming here by himself; he feels as if he’s stepped into a foreign country, and knows only enough words to ask for directions to the airport. 

“The astrophytum myriostigma, or Bishop’s Hat. A good choice.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees closed eyes and a smile. And of course, a notebook. He straightens. “Yanagi Renji. What brings you here?”

“I think, for the same reason that you’re here.”

“Okada-san likes plants?”

The smile widens. “Not exactly the same reason. I’m looking for something for Seiichi. As an apology. But,” And he gestures at the myriad of flora that surrounds them. “I might just ask Genichirou to bring him here instead. The shopping would be as enjoyable as the purchase, in this case.”

“Ah.” He slips his hands into his pockets.

“Are you going to get that?”

He shakes his head. 

“Would you like to go for a drink, then?”

They end up in the nursery’s café, a white-washed, wooden affair that thrives on the overpowering light of afternoon. The drinks are cool; the food passable. Yanagi orders two cups of coffee, both black. His only explanation, unneeded but seemingly automatic on his part, is that he slept badly the night before. 

“In your German team, Tezuka, there was a person called Adalbert Keller.”

He stops mid-bite. Then, carefully, as if nothing has happened, he continues chewing. When he is done, he says, “I am aware.”

“It seems the two of you didn’t get along.”

“How did you infer this?”

“I met some of your teammates.”

“I see. And what did they tell you?”

“Nothing. I inferred.”

He picks up a piece of chicken with his chopsticks. His hands are perfectly steady. They don’t show at all his desire to both hide, and throw his bowl of ramen at Yanagi’s head. 

“You played a game against him, in Osaka.”

“How did you know this?”

“People saw you on the street courts. At that time of day, not enough people to cause a significant rumour. I assume your agent has not been informed of it.”

She has not. Or, at least, she has not seen the need to inform him of it. 

“I asked you a question once, Tezuka. I don’t know if you remember it.”

He remembers it. He drops his chicken back into the soup. “Ah.”

“What do you think?”

What Kunimitsu remembers most, is not really the night itself, but the day after. How it’d hurt to wake up, hurt to wash his face and put on his clothes and walk out onto the tennis court. And yet, nothing hurt the way it hurt to pick up his racquet. How filthy it was in his hands. 

He could not play with a filthy racquet, but this was not a reason he could give. The reporters, questioning his surprise crash-outs in Melbourne and Paris; his coach, shaking his head at his poor performance in practice; his teammates, watching him as if he’d decided to grow another head, a different head, one that didn’t make him less monstrous than before. He could not play with a filthy racquet, but this was not a reason they would understand. 

And when he’d trained himself not to see the filthiness of the racquet, to see instead the court before him and the weak, fearful eyes of Adalbert Keller and all the people like him, it became hard to look anywhere else. 

“Tezuka,” says Yanagi. “What do you think of joining a tennis tournament?”

The question makes no sense. 

“A reprisal of our last year in junior high, before you went pro. I’ll gather together as many of the old teams as possible, and we can have our tournament. Atobe Keigo has a suitable venue, which I’m sure he would be happy to offer.”

“Why?”

“I think it would be fun.”

He does not know what to say. 

“Consider it,” suggests Yanagi. “E-mail or text me your answer.” He slides a business card over the table. Good quality paper, and clear text. The pattern is suitably striking, but does not hurt the eyes. It is as well calculated as this meeting has been. 

“You have it,” he says. “My diary.”

As with Fuji, Yanagi is caught by directness. “I do.”

“Can I see it?”

The wheels work in Yanagi’s head, calculating the percentage chance that the anonymous note, in its insistence on exclusivity, referred also the diary’s owner. Apparently deciding that it is a loophole, he reaches into his bag, and produces the phone.

“It mirrors your nightly reflections, I believe.”

Scrolling down the entries, he has to agree. He hands it back to Yanagi. “How did you know?” he asks. “Was it something in there?”

“It was the catalyst.”

“Of what idea?”

Yanagi picks up the phone, swipes his thumb upwards a few times, and then lays it on the table, facing Kunimitsu. 

My serve needs to improve in speed. Practise for thirty minutes before training starts. Ask Fuji to help me perfect the modified Zero-Shiki Drop Shot. He has been hinting that I must hone my game for the Olympics. It is expected that I do Japan proud. 

I have been remiss in replying e-mails from Aoi-san. This is not last year. Even if I am unsure about participating in the Australian Open, I should assure her of a later, more decisive reply. She will become concerned. 

Introduce ten minutes more of meditation into my morning routine. Echizen does not believe that I am playing at my best. He is increasingly irritated. 

“It’s about appearances,” says Yanagi. 

The word cuts. 

“I don’t mean that you are shallow, Tezuka. It is simply that your diary indicates a preoccupation with an appearance of normality. Considering that your entries are mainly to do with tennis, it was not a vast jump in logic to conclude that something had affected your perception of the game.”

“I see.” He closes his eyes, opens them again. Phrases were swimming in the darkness of his mind. It is expected. I should assure her. Echizen does not believe. 

“I should have been aware of this.”

He does not realise that he has said this aloud, until Yanagi says, with a certain wistfulness, “Who would?”

 

On this hellishly hot day, Kazuya is starting to wish he’d brought more bottles of water. As it is, he’ll have to go to a vending machine or the café later, and he hates paying for water he could have gotten from the tap at home. 

“Here.” There is a bottle in his face. Almost literally. 

Yukimura is smirking at him. “Poor game?”

“I might,” he says. “Have underestimated your boyfriend.”

“Kendo translates well to tennis.”

“I still don’t understand why you spend your days off playing tennis.”

“You’re here.”

“You invited me. This is a once-in-a-while thing.”

“Who says it isn’t for us?”

Genichirou has turned on one of the ball machines. Cranked it up to high. He bats back each ball with ease. 

“Okay,” Yukimura says. “Maybe we do.”

“Game and the match, Echizen Ryoga!” He can hear the crowing from two courts over. It makes the back of his neck itch. “Mada mada daze, right, Ryoma?”

He doesn’t hear Ryoma’s reply. It was probably something like ‘tch’. 

Something tinkles. An unfamiliar Chinese song. Yukimura digs into his tennis bag, retrieves his phone. “Morning, kaa-san. Yes, I know it’s not actually morning.” He walks away, and Kazuya ducks his head, giving him his privacy. 

But the call has reminded him of something. 

Rummaging around in his own bag, he pulls out Yanagi’s notebook. There are no new entries. What really concerns him, anyway, are the entries from the past three days. The first one, on Tuesday, started out similar to the one before; detailed observations and predictions about human behaviour, and, almost an afterthought, the statement that he’d had a nightmare. But, when Kazuya woke up on Wednesday and checked the book, he’d found Tuesday’s entry expanded. At some time in the night, Yanagi had written the same statement over and over again and filled half a page.  
On Thursday, there were two pages.

This morning, he’d found three.

It was unlike Yanagi to waste space like this. Every other page in the notebook was crammed with neat handwriting. 

And sometime in the early afternoon, after lunch, he’d opened the book to find every single wasted page torn out. The rip was so clean that it was as if they’d never been there in the first place. 

Experimentally, he closed the book and held it out in front of him, so that he was looking at the pages from the top. From here, he could see gaps that hadn’t been there before. Slipping a nail into one, he opened the book again, ran his thumb down the gutter. The remnants of paper poked into his skin. 

He read the entry on the left. An analysis of Sanada’s kendo diet. There is a note at the bottom: He is unnecessarily severe about his carbohydrates intake now that Seiichi is returning. 

On the right side, there is a homework timetable. 

He closes the book, tries again. The book opens to a later section.

The left is an observation of a teacher’s tics whilst speaking. Apparently, her pregnancy has made her more irritable, and that buying her a can of Coke before the lesson would soften her mood by thirty-two point eleven percent. At the bottom, a note: There is a sixty three percent chance that Seiichi will come to pick Genichirou up from the bus stop. Take Exit D instead. 

The next page has a quantification timetable for classmate alertness averages. At the bottom of the scale, one is equivalent to sleeping the entire class through. 

On impulse, Kazuya flicks backwards. Homework timetables, analyses of his family’s attitudes through an average of seven days’ phone conversations, a graph on the success rate of approaching a depressed classmate in various ways. In the last ten pages, there are three notes and one map.

Above the map: Genichirou spends eighty one percent of his time on campus in the social sciences faculty, and hence eighty nine percent of his time in the surrounding area, the furthest points of which are Exits A, B, the faculty itself and the mathematics faculty. To avoid him, the necessary adjustments to route are as follows:

Below another homework timetable: The chance that Seiichi or Genichirou will attempt to meet me at my supermarket of choice, and hence run into me at the pharmacy, stands at seventy seven percent. Nonetheless, I do not have sufficient time to visit a pharmacy that is further away. If it snows, the percentage chance drops to fifteen. 

What is most interesting is a chart comparing the potency and side effects of various types of sleeping pills. So far as Kazuya knows, it is the only thing in this notebook not even tangentially related to human interactions.

Beneath it is this note: I had another nightmare. The chance that it will snow tonight: ninety three percent. 

It makes him wonder if Yanagi’s recording of his own nightmares has been as consistent as he’s believed. 

It makes him wonder if there is a more consistent way to estimate their occurrence. 

“That looks like a data book.”

He shuts it. Yukimura’s gaze is predatory. “Inui-kun lent it to me.”

“Did he. I didn’t know Inui was in the habit of giving away his data like that.”

“He said it was an experiment.”

“Is that so.”

“Yes,” he says. “That’s so.”

He holds out a hand. “Can I have a look.”

Yes, he wants to say. Yes, because I think you might actually know what to do with it. Yes, because I don’t know why you weren’t the one who got this in the first place. But then, he remembers the anonymous note. And, also, how torn pages about nightmares seem to correspond to Yukimura’s and Sanada’s presence in Yanagi’s life.

“Sorry. Inui-kun said it was private.”

“Yukimura-san,” Ryoma calls. “Play a game with me. Not a half-arsed one.”

Ryoga laughs, incredulous. “Say that again, chibisuke.”

“Why, you’ll tell tou-san?”

“No, I’ll just laugh at you. Twice as good. Or would you prefer that I cry? Your grown-up-ness is making me all teary.”

“Yukimura-san.” Ryoma sounds impatient.

Yukimura leaves. Kazuya lets out a breath. Dropping the book back into his bag and picking up his racquet, he looks up to see that Ryoga has circled over to their court, and is standing behind Sanada, as if he were watching him. In truth, he is watching Kazuya. 

Ryoga’s eyes are dark and deep like a forest. They echo. 

 

Rain. Blood. A grey sky and a grey road, stretching forever downwards even as he is drenched to the bone and water clouds his eyes, and it is seared into his memory, the body by the roadside, bloodied and broken and waiting, and he looks up, and there’s nothing but an Infinite Deep. 

Sun. Cool. A hand in his that does not move, bloated with inertia, and eyes that rove wildly, mad with imprisonment. That hand will never hold a racquet again. Those eyes have lost their simplicity. The sun pushes, pushes, pushes through the window, and he cannot move. He is waiting; waiting in an Infinite Deep. 

Winter. Streetlight. Voice ripped from his throat, heart frozen. The headlights brighten, overtake the night, and the man stands there, a rock crunched like an apple; muscles tear and bones crack, and he can hear it, echoing forever in the Infinite Deep.

After the darkness of his bedroom, the kitchen lights spark fireflies in his eyes. He feels around for his cup on the rack, turns on the tap, and tips cold water into his mouth. It soothes his dry throat. He splashes water onto his face. He can open his eyes again. He stares at his face, reflected in the stainless steel of the cabinets, and does not like what he sees. He is pale and haggard; there is a set to his mouth like bittergourd. 

Abruptly, he turns away. Just as abruptly, he regrets it.

His phone is lying on the kitchen table. 

The force of the yearning shocks him. 

It would be easy, so easy, to call. 

“Is there something,” Tezuka had said, putting his chopsticks down. “Something you think you should have known, Yanagi?”

The afternoon sun is flat and heavy on the ground, a sloth clinging to its favourite branch. Tezuka’s voice is even and serious, not an inflection out of place. There is nothing in it to indicate why he believes Renji will tell him. They are strangers; acquaintances.

But Tezuka, like Seiichi and Genichirou, is a person of the present tense. At this moment, a phone lies a between them. In that phone lies a secret, one that he did not choose to share. By his logic, that is reason enough. 

It is a logic that Renji shares. 

“I tend,” he says. “To have nightmares. The same nightmares, repeatedly.” 

There are three likely responses to this statement. Tezuka chooses the least likely. 

“Are Yukimura and Sanada aware of this?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It seems that they are part of the problem.”

How dark it is in the kitchen. Every light on, and it is the shadows from beyond that seem to creep in. He picks up the phone, holds it in his hand. When he unlocks it, he sees Seiichi’s and Genichirou’s numbers on the home screen. He hasn’t changed it. He’s never gotten around to it. 

At five thirty a.m., the chances that Genichirou will pick up stand at seventy eight percent. 

“The nightmares,” he says to Tezuka. “Have a strong correlation with their presence or absence in my daily affairs. I believe my unconscious has…picked up on my complex feelings for them.”

“Complex.”

In the quiet of dusk, the words seems so inappropriate now. It makes Renji want to laugh. It doesn’t make him more or less likely to press dial. 

He draws a network in the air with his fingers. How hot the sun is, even though the air conditioned air is cold. “Not many people realise this in their day-to-day lives, but society has a very rigid framework for feeling.”

Tezuka nods. 

“There are many types of feelings that society forbids, all with good reason. Incest,” and he draws a horizontal line. “Because of the medical effects on the child. Paedophilia,” and he draws a vertical one. “Because one party in the relationship is not equipped to understand or consent to what the other wants.” He drops his hand, because this is one thing he has never been able to explain, not to Akaya with his psychology quiz woes, not to Tezuka now. “Polyamory.”

At first, Tezuka doesn’t catch on. But then his eyes widen slightly, and Renji knows he’s understood.

He says, “Ah.”

The kitchen lights are stark. They do not flicker. They do not change. The only movement is the sound of the dial: beep-beep-silence-beep-beep-silence-beep.

Genichirou picks up. “Renji.” He sounds awake, this time. “What is it?”

When Tezuka turns away, the ostensible rejection makes Renji’s throat seize up. But, Tezuka has only turned to look outside. His voice is not condemnatory, only distant. Like the sun that beats upon the earth beyond the glass walls. “Yanagi,” he says. “Don’t misunderstand. The tournament. I appreciate it. It is a good thing that you have tried to do for me.”

There must be a connection somewhere. He works to find it. 

“It is just that,” And now he looks at him. Renji finds that he was mistaken. Tezuka is not distant at all. In his own way, there is an empathy in his gaze. “I have come to feel that there are…certain other people that I wish had found out first.”

“I don’t know how Yukimura or Sanada would react to your feelings. What I do know is that, regardless of those feelings, they would wish to know if you were facing some kind of difficulty. You should allow them to know.”

“Renji.” Genichirou’s voice has turned sharp. “What’s wrong? Why aren’t you speaking?”

“Ah,” he says. “Sorry, I was thinking.”

“About what?”

The most surprising thing about what Tezuka had said is: it isn’t surprising. At some level, Renji had always known it. It is something he should have known. 

But there is a gap, between knowledge and reality. 

“A homework assignment,” he says. He rests his free hand on the basin behind him, looks up into the empty space around him, the edges where darkness seeps into light. “Is Seiichi asleep?”

“Yes. Did you want to talk to him.”

“No. It’s fine.” A pause. “Has he been eating properly?”

There is an eighty five percent chance that Genichirou tenses at this point, only to relax into resignation. “Yes.”

“And you? Have you been looking both…”

“Yes, Renji. Why must you always ask these questions?”

Because of my dreams, he wants to say. Because Fuji is always broken, Seiichi is always numb, and you are always just beyond my reach. 

“Does it bother you?”

“No.” It’s a lie between gritted teeth. 

“Tell Seiichi I said good morning, then.”

A pause. Gruffly, almost apologetically, Genichirou says, “I passed my test.”

He smiles. “That’s great. Congratulations.”

And they work down the list of polite questions, like the acquaintances they are becoming.


	11. Chapter 11

Chapter Eleven

Syusuke likes plants. 

When he moved into his own one-bedroom flat, the first thing he’d done was to go and purchase plants. 

There was already a potted Chinese evergreen next to the bookshelf in the living room, its speckled leaves brightening the dark corner. Geraniums inhabited the windowsills and the centre of the island table in the kitchen. In the bathroom, there was a pot of Warneckii, its bear white stripes blending in nicely with the unimaginative colour scheme. The real estate agent seemed to find all this excessive plant-ness unattractive, and explained that the previous owner, also a university student, was the buyer. 

Syusuke had smiled, eyes closed, and offered to come and sign the papers. 

After he’d unpacked and arranged his cacti in the most advantageous areas, he bought sandwiches and boarded the bus. There was a particular nursery outside Tokyo, known for its collection of cacti. He liked to go there for special occasions. 

The trip itself took five hours. The decoration, two days. 

When Kuranosuke came over with a housewarming gift, he’d taken one look at the place, and said, “Well. I don’t think you’ll be needing this, will you?”

After a little reordering, he and Syusuke managed to install the dwarf schefflera, a prime specimen with glossy green leaves, in the landing, next to the shoe rack. 

Now, Syusuke stands opposite this schefflera, and smiles. There is a sheaf of letters in his hand. One of them has been opened, and whilst the paper itself was neatly re-folded, it pokes out of the tear. 

The door to the bedroom opens. Closes.

Footsteps on the floor. 

“Good morning.”

Syusuke remembers the day he and Tezuka met. Not the whole thing, not even chunks large enough to form a coherent narration. At some point in the day, he was waiting in the airport, hands in his pockets. Tezuka appeared, hair ruffled from the flight and eyes only habitually alert behind his glasses. There was some conversation, some laughter. Dinner, or perhaps lunch, somewhere. And, of course, there had been the silence in Syusuke’s apartment, after they’d showered and Tezuka had unpacked. He doesn’t even remember who touched who first.

What he does remember is the feeling. As if he were a bird in the wind, gliding on currents, flapping aimlessly when the breeze died, and suddenly, without meaning to, he’d found himself spiralling towards home. 

Home was a concrete thing, he’d thought. A physical thing that didn’t require a past, a history laid open before them. Home was a closed box, impervious to all external forces.

But he supposes he should have known. Home was Yuuta too, after all. 

“Good morning,” he says to Tezuka. He hands him the letter.

Tezuka takes it, notes that it has been opened, and glances at him. 

“It was addressed to both of us.”

He pulls out the paper, unfolds it and reads it. There is no change of expression, but he adjusts his glasses, and that speaks volumes. 

“He talks as if he’s mentioned it to you before.”

“Yes. We met.”

“You didn’t think to tell me.”

He could have lied, said that it hadn’t been a confirmed thing. “I didn’t know how to tell you.”

Syusuke smiles. Yuuta tells him that this is his most sadistic face, but Tezuka barely flinches. His even gaze is almost that of a stranger’s. That hurts more than fear would.

“A reprisal,” he says. “Is he not aware that it’s been seven years?” Is he not aware that there are some things that can’t be un-changed? Are you?

“It’s for fun.”

“Ah. It should be fun. Have fun, Tezuka.” He turns, starts to toe on his shoes. 

Tezuka steps forward, takes his arm. “Fuji,” he says. His name, said like that, sounds like a plea. A postcard sent a thousand miles, showing a sky that looks like it could have come from anywhere and nothing but a signature behind. A phone call once every six months where they say everything they could have said in an e-mail or a text, and end up quiet, moments before they say their goodbyes. A non-memory of silence in an apartment meant for one person, and touches that begin from one of them, that could have begun from either. 

“I’m selling my camera,” he says to the door. “After the tournament, come and help me pick out a new one.”

Tezuka doesn’t answer.

He shuts the door behind him. 

 

Ryoga is standing in his doorway. 

He is standing in his doorway, and eyeing the clothes on the floor, the half-open wardrobe, the stack of tennis and celebrity magazines on the desk, and the pillow he’s somehow gotten lodged between cabinet and shelf, with a twist on his lips that can only be disapproval.

The image is so familiar that Kazuya nearly forgets to snap. Nearly.

“What do you want?”

“It’s nearly eight.”

“Yeah. What about it? We don’t have practice on Sundays.”

“Come for a sec.”

“Why?”

Ryoga is quiet for a moment. Finally, he says, “You should be tidier. There could be bugs in here. They might crawl all over you when you’re sleeping, and you wouldn’t know.”

He wonders if Ryoga hit his head yesterday. Ryoma’s new test shot had smashed into a lot of vulnerable bits on many people’s bodies. Somewhere in the chaos, he might have given his brother a concussion too. There is no other reason why Ryoga would believe they were still capable of civil conversation. “It’s really not your business.”

“And you forgot to buy toilet paper and hand soap again. The Post-it notes on the fridge are there for a reason.”

“Ryoga,” he says. “What the hell do you want?”

His eyes are not as expressive as Ryoma’s are. They don’t widen. They don’t turn contemplative. They are perpetually bored. “Come for a sec,” he repeats.

“Why?”

“I’ll stop bothering you if you do.”

If it turned into a war of attrition, he’s pretty sure he could weather it out. But there is something about Ryoga’s manner, perhaps an ease more reminiscent of a month ago than of now, that makes him get up. 

It is his turn to halt in Ryoga’s doorway, arms folded. 

“Come in.”

“No.”

“Come in.”

He comes in. Ryoga gestures at his bed. “Sit down.”

This has taken longer than a second. He sits down. 

Ryoga closes the door. And then leans against it. 

“What are you doing?”

He digs his hand into his pocket, takes out a phone.

For a second, Kazuya wonders if that is a diary. If Ryoga has discovered a diary, maybe his diary. The thought makes him jump to his feet. 

But Ryoga motions at him to sit down, and the jangling sound draws Kazuya’s eyes to the little bell hanging on the phone. A birthday present from Ryoma. He sits back down. 

Ryoga dials a number. When the beeping fills the room, Kazuya realises that he’s put it on loudspeaker. 

 

“Hello, Takeda-san,” says Kanata. There’s a sound in the background, a creaking like mattress springs. A thud. He schools his face. He finds it helps to school his thoughts. “Is this a bad time?”

“That’s what the caller says, 2232-san.” Takeda sounds amused, and strained. “I wouldn’t call if it was a bad time.”

“Okay.”

“Actually, I had something very specific to talk to you about.”

Kanata eyes the pencils in the mug on his desk. He wonders if it will help to just grip them, like stress balls. “What is that?”

“You know what you said last time, about how whores don’t exist.”

“I didn’t say that. I said…”

“That I shouldn’t let people call me one. Yes, okay. About that.” 

There is a silence. When Takeda speaks, his voice is back to normal. “Well, I did what you said, and I tried to step back from the problem. It’s more difficult than I thought.”

He answers cautiously. “It usually is.”

“Well, when I did that, I found, you know what, that I’m the problem.”

Kanata shakes his head. 

“And you’re going to say that’s not the point of the exercise, okay. Just let me explain.”

He stays silent.

“You remember my friend? The one who called me a whore.” The word rolls so easily off Takeda’s tongue. For some reason, each time he says it, it gets harder for Kanata to listen to.

“He was in a relationship with this guy. They’d both helped me out a lot. This guy, he asked my friend out, even though everyone knew the person my friend was crushing on was me.”

There are a lot of familiar stories. Kanata bites his tongue, and reminds himself that this isn’t about him. This is about Takeda.

“Then, when my friend and I went somewhere, we both got drunk and we fucked. My friend got really guilty about it, and he told his boyfriend, and they broke up.”

“That isn’t your fault,” Kanata says before he can stop himself. “Their relationship was already unstable to begin with. If there had been more trust…”

“Yeah,” says Takeda. His voice is gentle. It takes Kanata a moment to realise that Takeda is soothing him. “Yeah, but you see, it wasn’t completely an accident. I wasn’t so drunk that I didn’t know I was doing it. I set out to fuck him.”

Springs. Thuds. There is static when Takeda covers the phone. He can hear him saying something approximating to ‘shut up and sit down’.

“A few years back, I was in this relationship. With a girl. A nice girl. But my job involves a lot of travelling, and I was a bit of a flirt, so we fought a lot. Didn’t end nicely. So I got drunk a lot, fucked around a lot, and I think, at some point, I just,” He laughs. “I started, you know, letting people call me a whore. I…” The pause is long. “There was a time when I just really, really wanted to have a good relationship.”

Takeda’s voice breaks. “But I couldn’t. I can’t. Because no matter what, no matter how hard I try, I’m too scared. I’m scared I’ll lose them. And then, I start acting out, screwing around, and they start looking at me like that, and I look at myself and all I see is that too.”

Kanata is quiet. It’s not a choice, this time. 

Miyamura leans over him, grabs a pencil from the mug and starts to scribble something down on a piece of paper. In the time it takes Kanata’s eyes to swivel from her back to the mug and the blank wall in front of his desk, Takeda composes himself. The sardonic lilt is back in his voice. 

“So,” he says. “I thought, if I can’t fix myself first, I might as well swear off relationships for now. Like a monk, you know. Go on a pilgrimage somewhere and gets some beads first. Start over.”

It sounds so heavy. The lightness in his voice.

“Na, Irie-san?”

“You fucking idiot!” Kazuya. 

“Irie-san. Irie-san.”

I get it, he thinks numbly. I get it. Stop calling my name.

“Irie-san.” Miyamura pushes her face into his. Her hand is on his shoulder. The other is grasping the cord of the phone he dropped. She places it back into its cradle, turns to him. Her eyebrows are knitted together. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” he says. He stands up. “Sorry. I have to go.”

“You have to go?”

Blindly, he reaches for his bag. “I have to go.”

“Irie-san!”

The sound of his name chases him down the hallways, and into the morning that has, sometime in his absence, settled on the streets. 

 

For once, it isn’t difficult to find his brother. 

Not for once, Yuuta thinks. It has gotten easier and easier to find his brother, as if the flitting shadow of his younger years one day anchored itself to this spot, and never let go. 

“Don’t,” he says. “Text me to meet you, and expect me to know where to go.”

Aniki smiles. “But you did know where to go.”

Yuuta drops onto the bench beside him. At this time of day, there aren’t many people on the platform. A father and two children. A woman tapping on her phone. A boy in sports clothes, carrying a badminton racquet. His hand is in a sling. His eyes are downcast. 

Despite himself, Yuuta looks away. Glares at aniki instead. “What did you want?”

Of course, there is no immediate answer. Just a smile. 

For a while, that is all they do. Glare and smile. 

A shout, of pure joy, gains Yuuta’s attention. He glances away, to see the little girl dragging her father to the small store next to the ticket counter. She points to a large lollipop. Her brother is tugging at the man’s slacks. His whining is intelligible. 

“Do you remember,” aniki says. “That time you walked me back home.”

The badminton boy has sat down on another bench. Yuuta folds his arms, and doesn’t look at him. “Yeah.”

“I was really tired that day, wasn’t I, Yuuta?”

“Tired doesn’t cut it,” he snaps. The boy is making him bad-tempered. “You were fucking falling over.”

Aniki nods. “Sorry about that.”

“Sorry doesn’t cut it either.”

“Do you remember what you said to me?”

He doesn’t remember saying anything. Just shouting and helping his brother walk a couple of steps and shouting some more. 

“You said, don’t do this to me.”

He blinks. And slowly, slowly, he feels his face burning up. “I did not.”

Laughter. “You did.” More seriously, “You woke me up, Yuuta.”

“I did…not.”

“After the accident.” He says it so delicately. It sounds ten times worse now than right after, when nee-san had called him and told him Syuusuke’s in the hospital, you have to come right now, it’s fine though Yuuta, he’s in the ER but he’s going to be fine, and broke down crying. “I was very focused on my own recovery.”

Yuuta snorts. 

“I stopped seeing people. My teammates. My friends.” Aniki is smiling. His perpetual smile. “I made a promise to myself, that I was going to get better in time for Nationals. Now that I think about it, I was probably scared. Because I knew the truth.”

The truth hangs between them; like the boy that Yuuta refuses to see out of the corner of his eye. 

“So I worked myself to exhaustion. Schoolwork. Sleep. All my time was spent on rehab.” He chuckles, makes an expansive gesture with his left hand. “This train station. It was like my second home.”

Involuntarily, Yuuta’s gaze follows the gesture. He sees the boy get up, walk to the yellow line of the platform. The red numbers hanging over their heads morph rapidly, fast approaching zero. 

“What I didn’t realise,” Aniki says. “Is that what I was doing to myself, I was doing to everyone else too.”

The train arrives. It keens into the station, an arrow barrelling towards its target. The boy’s thin shirt lifts in the breeze. His skin is dark. He’s spent a lot of time in the sun. 

“You remember, Yuuta. I did go to Nationals. We went together, and we cheered for everyone. Didn’t we?” His brother is looking at him now, but Yuuta can’t bear to look at him. He feels as if he’s caught between staring at his brother and staring at the boy he didn’t want to even glance at before, and there’s no alternate choice. 

The doors of the train open. The boy waits until the few passengers have trickled out, and then gets on. There are plenty of seats, but he grabs onto the pole with his good hand. His eyes are still fixed on his shoes.

“Aniki,” he says. “This is about the invitation, isn’t it.”

There is a pause. He catches a flash of blue, even though he is very carefully not looking. And then his brother’s eyes slip closed again. “Yes.”

It is only when the train has shot out of the building, and he is left staring at open air, that Yuuta realises he was willing the boy to look up. He never did.

“If I couldn’t go to Nationals….again, would that be okay, Yuuta?”

Yuuta has grown up a lot since junior high. He has quit tennis, he no longer wants to punch walls on principle, he’s going to a good university and studying a subject he loves, thank you very much. But there is one thing, he thinks as he stares into his brother’s smiling face, that will never change. 

He will always hate to see Fuji Syusuke defeated. 

“Ah,” he says. 

Another shout, this time of pure rage, catches his attention. The girl’s face is turning purple. She is jabbing her finger at something on the floor, and her brother’s intelligble whining has turned to full-on screaming. Their father stares between them haplessly. Yuuta looks at the something. 

“It’s just a lollipop,” he says, annoyed. “She can get another one.”

Aniki smiles. “But look, Yuuta.” He points at the rack on top of the shop’s ice-cream box. “There aren’t any red ones left.”


	12. Chapter 12

Chapter Twelve

Spring is vicious this year. The air is crisp, but the temperature has stood at eighteen to twenty degrees Celsius all this week, and today, at a record twenty-two degrees, winter seems to have resigned itself to defeat. 

Genichirou sits at the bus stop, arms folded and eyes closed, meditating on this fact. It is better than listening to Akaya shout. 

“Buchou, why isn’t Yanagi-senpai here?”

“He’s already at the mansion, Akaya. He went to overlook the preparations.”

“Then, why are you and fukubuchou here?”

Seiichi smiles. “We’re taking the bus with you.”

“What…so this was Yanagi-senpai’s idea?”

“He sent the invitations, didn’t he?”

“It’s a great idea,” says Marui. He’s gotten a haircut in the years since Genichirou has seen him, but he still pops pink bubblegum. “If kind of out-of-the-blue. You know what brought it on, Yukimura?” A glance sideways, but Marui doesn’t say his name. Perhaps it’s the scowl on his face. 

“No,” says Seiichi. The cheer in his tone is light as ice. 

“Did Yanagi discuss it with either of you?”

“No, Marui. He didn’t.”

“Marui-senpai,” says Akaya. “Why are your questions so weird?”

Genichirou doesn’t know if being with his seniors is good for Akaya’s psyche. He always regresses to a child with them, with a child’s wilful lack of understanding. 

Niou drops an arm around Akaya’s shoulders. “Let’s win it, this time,” he says. “Win back that third Nationals.”

Gathered at Atobe’s designated bus stop, dressed in tailored imitations of the Rikkai uniform, they are all somewhat strangers to each other. Akaya has spent the last few years with a team in England, and is newly returned. He speaks English effectively, if with a heavy accent, and is a head taller than Seiichi. Marui and Jackal stopped playing tennis, and Marui moved away. The former has grown thinner and lankier, and eyes Genichirou’s chocolate balls with a mixture of indifference and lingering curiosity. The latter has a scar running down his right forearm. Niou smiles more tightly now. Sometime after he left for Kyoto, he’d stopped dying his hair. It is black, and cropped close to his head. Yagyuu looks no different; it is his manner that has changed, become even more subdued than before. 

Such plastic changes, Renji would say. And yet, there is a distance between them, even as Niou’s words bring tentative smiles to their lips. 

“Yes,” he says, surprising himself. “Rikkai will not lose.”

They stare at him, stunned into silence. 

This lasts less than a second.

By the time the bus trundles up to them, Genichirou has pulled his cap down far enough to cover half his face, and Seiichi is shaking the box of chocolate balls they made together on Friday, and attempting to say between snorts, “Does…does anyone want anymore of these?”

 

“Oishi!”

Kunimitsu steps back instinctively, so that when Oishi stumbles from the force of Kikumaru’s greeting, it doesn’t cause a domino effect. 

“Eiji.” They have not seen each for months, Kunimitsu knows, but the helpless smile on Oishi’s face is unchanged. He believes that they will always greet each other like this, even if years pass between their meetings and they forget, as most eventually do, to pick up the phone and call. 

Kaidou and Inui arrive together. They must have met at the end of the block, and they are still deep in conversation as they approach. He hears something about juices and glowing lime colours before Momoshiro accosts his former rival, and the two of them threaten to start a brawling match on the street.

Inui, attention free to wander, settles in on him with an adjustment of his glasses. “Tezuka,” he says. “I see that my prediction was correct.”

“What prediction?” asks Kikumaru. But then, his face splits open into a smile, and he starts to wave energetically at a point beyond Inui. “Ochibi!”

“Uiss.”

“Ochibi, you’re so tall!” And still, Echizen finds himself subjected to a headlock, and a bout of unwanted friction between cap and head. 

“Who’s that?” Following Oishi’s gaze, Kunimitsu sees white hair, red eyes and a grin like a Cheshire cat. Akise Aru waves at Echizen once, then gets back into his car and drives away. 

“My boyfriend.”

“You have a boyfriend, ochibi? Isn’t he coming? Does he play tennis? Doesn’t he want to come and watch you?”

Echizen lowers his head. There is no expression, on a cap. “No.”

“Why not?”

“He’s going somewhere.” When he looks up, it is to stare straight at Kunimitsu. “With Fuji-senpai.”

“Fujiko-chan? But Fujiko-chan is…”

“Not coming.” Inui snaps his notebook shut, tucks his pen back into his bag. 

He expects Kikumaru to ask why. He doesn’t. 

“Ah,” says Oishi, too loudly. “The bus is here.”

 

The venue is Atobe-esque. 

A mansion’s sprawling gardens, each individual flower and tree dug up and hauled away carefully. Tennis courts substituted for grass; bleachers for benches. Professional referees wander around in uniform and lanyards, talking to each other. Crisp new scoreboards are propped up next to each court. A water park, haunted house, and a beach installed just for the weekend. And in this garden of constructed delights, mill the shadows of people that he recognises, if vaguely. Those players who now live outside of Tokyo, and were transported here last night. 

“If we were going to come here, we could’ve just taken the buses.”

“That would mean we knew we were coming here, Akise-kun.”

“And we didn’t?”

Syusuke brushes a hand over his camera, dangling from its cord around his neck, and laughs. “Of course not. Not until that changeover.”

Akise is lying on his back, an arm over his eyes. His pale skin is damp with sweat. His feet hang over the side of the cliff, shoes tied just a little too loosely, but he doesn’t seem to care. 

“Five miles, Fuji-san. Uphill. Did Ryoma ever tell you about Mount Fuji?”

“I think so. Several times.”

“That bastard.”

Syusuke drops his head back, lets the wind comb through his hair. Its fingers are questing, friendly, not at all the bitter cold of winter. It had been a day like this, he thinks, when he’d first met Akise. 

“Echizen invited you to go.”

Akise doesn’t move. 

“But you didn’t. Why not?”

A sigh. “Why don’t you tell me?”

“Why should I?”

Now, he drops his arm, turns his bright eyes onto Syusuke. “You have my diary.”

“Ah,” he says. “I do.”

“You could use it. I spent a lot of time making it.”

“That would make things too easy for you.”

Those eyes narrowed, turned a flatter red. “Easy.”

Syusuke smiles, tips his head to the side. “I would be saying things for you that you couldn’t say for yourself.”

“And what is that?”

“What do you think?”

They stare at each other. Abruptly, Akise sits up. He shades his eyes against the sun, looking past the sudden drop below them, the trees that continue on a gentler incline furhter still, to the lush expanse of Atobe’s mansion. His T-shirt clings to his back, transparent with sweat. 

“It’s a good view,” he says. “Why don’t you take a picture.”

“Why don’t I.” The camera sits in his lap, untouched. 

Akise turns to him. The expression in his eyes is simple enough to read, as if he were tired of pretending. “It’s a junior high reprisal. He doesn’t need me there. I’m not supposed to be there.”

“You’re scared,” says Syusuke. 

“I’m not scared.” 

“Why so half-hearted, Akise-kun?” His voice is gentle. 

“Because I am,” he says. “I am, and I don’t know why.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Syusuke got to his feet. 

“Where are you going?”

“To take a picture.”

They walk back down from the cliff, weaving through the shrubbery to emerge again on the road. It is a straight road, but straight only for ten feet or so, before it hugs the curve of the mountain and disappears to higher things. They walk down, down, down. The sun is a caress on their backs, the birds and the rustling leaves a symphony. This high up, there are no phone lines, stark and black against the green. It is as though they’ve stepped back into time. 

Syusuke remembers another road like this one. Snaking grey below him, a shadow in the night and the storm. 

His leg aches. Perhaps at the thought, perhaps at the fact that gravity is forcing him downwards faster than he would’ve liked. Behind him, Akise says, “Fuji-san, walk closer to the side of the road. There might be cars.”

The irony, it makes him want to laugh. But that is not Akise’s fault, so he only smiles. 

“Fuji-san.” So insistent.

“Yes.” There is no harm in complying. At least, for now. 

 

“Yanagi,” trills Atobe. “Go and get changed. The opening ceremony is starting.”

“Yes,” he says. And to Yamaguchi-san, he says, “Change the room allocations for Momoshiro Takeshi and Kaidou Kaoru. I don’t want them getting into a fight. Put Inui Sadaharu in between.”

“Yanagi.” Atobe is still trilling, but in a sharp, frightening manner. “Orre-sama insists.”

He straightens, takes the key dangling from Atobe’s fingers. “What’s this?”

“The key to your room. I had it prepared earlier. Your clothes are laid out for you.”

He could have changed in the washroom. But, should he say that, the chances that he will hear something along the lines of ‘washrooms are for washing, not for being changed in’, stand at ninety seven percent.

“Thank you,” he says instead. “Atobe. For everything.”

It is somewhat dark, in the registration tent. But the man’s smile gleams, white as a toothpaste ad. “It was easy.”

As he walks down the mansion’s endless corridors, following signs inlaid with letters of pure gold, he is still running through the room allocations in his head. Rikkai, Rokkaku, and Fudomine have arrived, but Seigaku’s bus was caught in a jam. Seigaku’s members, as Inui has informed him, are a rowdy bunch. There are two possible permutations for allocation within the wing to which they have been allocated, and…

There are two keys on the ring, he notes. He fits the one that fits into the lock of the room he assigned himself to, turns the key, and opens the door. 

According to his calculations, there is a difference of only zero point five percent in how likely each permutation is to guard against chaos…

Seiichi looks up. His hands are still on Genichirou’s shoulders. There is a tailor-made, navy blue cap on the bed behind them. In their Rikkai uniforms, it is almost as if they are fifteen again. Except that their faces are red with exertion, and he would have shut his eyes out of mortification, if they weren’t already closed. 

“Renji.” He sounds surprised.

Looking down at the key, and then at the door, Renji sees where the mistake lies. He is going to murder Atobe. “Sorry,” he says. “This is the wrong room.”

Seiichi smiles, soothing as always. “Are all the preparations done?”

“Yes. The matches are starting at one.”

In a more business-like tone, Seiichi says, “The lineup’s done. Look it over when you’ve changed. Genichirou taped a copy to each door in the wing.”

Tape. Right. Atobe had provided a box with tape, pens, clipboards, and emergency tennis supplies. The percentage chance that taping things on the doors is okay: eighty seven percent. 

“I will.”

Silence. He should just close the door.

“It’s amazing,” Seiichi says. “What you and Atobe have done.”

There. The question hanging in the room. 

“I didn’t want to say anything,” he says. “Until it was confirmed.”

Genichirou ducks his head. Seiichi’s hands tighten on his shoulders. Atobe’s gauzy, pink curtains billow out behind them, trapping them in a moment’s rippling light. It dazzles Renji; how distant they seem. It is why he says, “There’s something else. I should tell you.”

“What.” Genichirou’s tone is solemn, heavy as a rock. 

“Next year. I won’t be here. I’m going to Oxford. For my Master’s.”

When it is Seiichi who opens his mouth, Renji knows it will hurt. “Congratulations. You should remember to call us, Renji. Once every few months. If you do, it’ll be like nothing’s changed.”

 

“Fuji-san,” says Akise. “What are you doing?”

“I’m taking a picture.”

The wind blows the sweat off his skin, blows his clothes backwards, as if he were a dress hanging on a clothing line, on the top floor of a skyscraper. Akise’s voice is strained. “You’re standing in the middle of the road.”

“I am.”

“It’s dangerous! Fuji-san, I know this area’s a little out of the way, but there are going to be cars…”

It’d be raining, that night. Late, and the last bus gone because they’d gotten separated from the group, gotten lost. They were walking on the side of the road, talking to each other, laughing at how wet Yanagi’s notebook must be getting, in his tennis bag made of cloth. 

When Yanagi had laid him on the wet grass, beyond the reach of the trees, and then left in search of aid, the thought that kept circling in his pain-lit mind was this: they’d been walking on the side of the road.

“Akise-kun,” he says. “You know what you’re scared of.”

“What?”

“It wasn’t a question. You know.”

There is a pause. “Fuji-san.” His voice is testy. “If I knew, why would I have bothered to give you a diary.”

“I know, and you gave me a diary.”

“You know.” The incredulousness, it reminds him of Echizen. The confidence in himself and his understanding of the world. He feels a surge of affection, for this strange, red-eyed boy. “What is it, then? What are you scared of, Fuji-san?”

He’d been bending his knees a little, in search of a good angle. Now, he straightens, because he’s heard the sound he was hoping to hear. “Boredom.”

“Boredom?” It is not, perhaps, the conclusion that Akise has come to. There is no recognition in his voice. No understanding.

“I’m afraid,” Syusuke says. “That I will wake up one day, and find nothing in this world to want.”

The low, smooth rumbling of a motor. Loud enough that Akise, who has not been listening, hears it too. He gasps, his body jerks, but the car is rounding the corner at breakneck speed, and he is a reasonable boy, a normal boy, despite what he might think. His sense of survival is strong enough to root him to the spot. 

Syusuke’s camera is in his hands. 

Glass, metal and light bear down on him, and in that moment, he feels as if he is open to the world. 

The camera; he drops it.


	13. Chapter 13

Chapter Thirteen

This is not a reprisal of the 2008 nationals. 

Kunimitsu can think of three reasons for this. First: playing skills vary too much across the board, from Olympic hopefuls to those who have not held a racquet since junior high. Second: the cheering is more good-natured. Eiji and Kintarou cheer when Atobe smashes a ball into Sanada’s court, only to cheer just as hard when Sanada returns the favour. Third: it is too quiet. Less than a hundred people clustered together in a thousand-foot square mansion; Kunimitsu can barely hear the sound of feet in the savannah of this garden. 

But at least, he thinks, the spirit is here. 

When Shiraishi executes a perfect, basic cord ball, the satisfaction, the drive in his eyes is the same. Humans want to win. It is a fundamental part of their nature. 

Kunimitsu tests the strings of his racquet, looks up at the scoreboard. Seigaku is up against Hyotei next. He feels determined. He feel a sense of duty. He feels a contained anticipation. 

There are shoes in front of him. He looks up.

Zaizen Hikaru is staring down at him. He barely remembers the boy. “I won’t step aside this time.” 

It takes Kunimitsu a moment to comprehend this. He nods. “I apologise, for before. Chitose and I were unprofessional, to ask you and Inui to leave it to us.”

Most people find his frankness disconcerting. Zaizen only looks back with the same frankness. His eyes are quiet. He extends his racquet, out to the side. Kunimitsu follows its direction, and finds Echizen Ryoga, smirking through his stretches. “Can you,” Zaizen says. “Apologise for him too?”

“I’m afraid not.”

An unblinking moment. “I don’t know who’s worse. Chitose, for not turning up, or him, for being his substitute.”

“Ah.”

“He swears. And makes sex jokes.”

“Ah.” He feels responsible. Perhaps because Ryoga looks like his younger brother. “Sorry.”

Clearly, Zaizen shares this feeling. He nods, a generous gesture. “As long as you don’t ignore me again.”

And then: “Do you feel better now?”

Kunimitsu pauses. “I’m fine.”

“Good. Was I funny?”

He doesn’t know what to say to that. 

“It’s fine if I wasn’t. It was just the spirit of the thing.”

“Spirit?”

“Since Konjiki-senpai died. A joke a day. Wakashi and I bought a book.”

Wakashi. Hiyoshi, his brain supplies. Hiyoshi Wakashi, Atobe’s scowling successor. “I see.”

Zaizen shifts his racquet from one hand to the other. The movement is practiced. If not a professional, Zaizen has at least been playing regularly. Combined with Echizen Ryoga, this should be a good match. 

No matter how Kunimitsu digs, he cannot find excitement. 

 

It should not be this hard, to corner a person in a crowd of a hundred-odd people. But Echizen is slippery, and Kanata finds that when he is not on the court, he has disappeared, a shadow dissipated by the coming of the sun. 

So, in Echizen’s match against Tezuka and Inui from Seigaku, he parks himself on the coach’s bench. Shiraishi glances at him. Then, turns and has a proper stare. “Kanata-san…”

“Don’t mind me, Shiraishi.”

“Okay. Um, but, why…”

“Let’s watch the game.”

Echizen looks at him once, in the second after he serves his second game. Then he is flashing towards Tezuka’s lob, and Kanata fades from his consciousness. He shouts his triumph when his partner delivers a smash, and the echo of Takeda in his voice makes Kanata flinch. 

“Is something wrong?” Shiraishi asks. 

Always so conscientious. It’d been both a blessing and a curse, in the months after Fuji’s accident. He could still remember coming back to the club room, seeing his hand-picked captain with his head bowed, still as a statue in evening’s orange wash. The memory softens his irritation, and he claps a hand on Shiraishi’s back. “Pay attention.”

At half-game, Echizen and his partner, whose name is Zaizen, come to the bench. 

“Good work,” says Shiraishi. 

Zaizen says nothing. Echizen grins. “Of course.” He is still not looking at Kanata. 

“Echizen,” he says. 

“Zaizen-kun, your analysis is pretty damn good.”

“I wasn’t analysing.”

Courtesy be damned. Kanata stands up, grabs Echizen by the shoulders, and says, “Listen.”

His eyes are insolent. “I’m in the middle of a match.”

“You lied to me.”

“Not saying is not the same as lying.”

“You told me your name was Takeda.”

A shrug, casual. “Okay. One lie.”

"I called you. Kazuya called you.”

“Battery died.”

He remembers now, why he couldn’t stand Echizen in the past. What, other than Kazuya’s crush on him, had made his hands want to curl into fists the moment they were within spitting distance of each other. 

But he also remembers Takeda. The cursing, impropriety, and hysteria. The gentleness.

Echizen has eyes of molten gold, a smile like neon, and an attitude the texture of purple silk in Kanata’s mind. Under the spring sun, this resolves itself into shadow; like everyone else, he is bleached out by the light.

“You’re right,” Kanata says. 

Eyebrows raised.

“You’re not ready for a relationship. Hell knows, you can’t have one without lying through your teeth.”

“Still mad about…”

“But, one day, you’re going to be.” Shiraishi and Zaizen are staring. Everyone is staring, and Kanata has the sudden feeling that he is on a stage, and the curtains are moments from closing. This is the final act. Like all final acts, it requires a final burst of energy. 

“And when you are,” His voice carries, in that theatrical quiet. “I’ll still be right here. Kazuya, Echizen-kun, will still be here. You understand?”

Ryoga’s face is stricken. 

Kanata sits back down the bench, folds his arms. “Go on,” he says. “Weren’t you in the middle of a game?”

 

Flowers. Trees. Shiraishi. Weird boy with the white hair. Flowers. Trees. Shiraishi. Genichirou rests the phone on his thigh, closes his eyes. He breathes in. Counts to ten. Breathes out. The pictures, discounting the ones with humans in them, are as good as meditating. When he opens his eyes, he feels calm.

Calmer, anyway.

“Showmanship,” says a voice. A familiar voice that drives a chill up his spine and into that nerve ending he’d thought reserved just for Akaya. It echoes in here, one of the vast sitting rooms on the ground floor of the mansion. Atobe drops down next to him on the sofa, lays his elbow across the back. Genichirou’s back straightens. If he touches that arm, he might…combust.

“You missed the whole thing, Sanada. A magnificent piece of showmanship. Nothing is as good at driving the point home.”

“Don’t you have a match to prepare for.”

“Don’t you?” 

“I was preparing. Meditating. Alone.”

But before he can react, the phone is plucked from his hands. “What interesting photos. Don’t tell me you’re the artist.”

“Atobe,” he says. “Give that back.”

He isn’t listening. Rather, he is flicking through the pictures, stopping every once in a while to stare at one in particular. His gaze is thoughtful. The expression on his face, when he glances at Genichirou, is all-knowing and insufferably smug. 

“What.”

“I thought you practised zazen, Sanada.”

“I do.”

“You must be doing it wrong, then.”

His muscles are tensing up. 

“Zazen is about clearing the mind, hnh?” He flings the phone back onto Sanada’s lap. “Thinking of nothing. If you are visualising someone’s happy place, you must be doing it wrong.”

Genichirou’s jaw drops. 

“Look at them,” says Atobe. “All that light. It’s like heaven. Hnh?”

He grabs the phone, flicks through the photographs. Light. There is a lot of light. It reminds him of the room he’d been in this morning, the light billowing in from the windows, Seiichi’s lips on his and Renji. Renji, standing at the door.

“Genichirou?”

Renji is standing at the door. The light, questioning tone. The uniform. It takes him back so many years, to a conversation on the courts after practice, Seiichi handing over to Akaya in the clubroom and Renji saying, I’m not going to Rikkai next year.

“That wasn’t there before.”

He looks down, at the picture on which he has inadvertently paused. 

Glass, metal and light. There is a lot of light. There is a man’s face, haloed in a trick of the sun; his hands are clenched on the steering wheel. 

“What’s the matter?” Renji comes to stand behind him. 

“It looks like a car,” muses Atobe. “It’s as if the photographer were standing in front of a car.”

At his ear, there is a sharp intake of breath. Genichirou glances up, only to see Renji disappearing out the door. His shoes squeak on the polished floors. 

“Where’s he going? Where are you going? Hey!” Atobe yells after him. “Rikkai’s match starts in ten minutes!”

He can hear the clapping as he skids into the afternoon light. Contained, low-scale. “Game and the match, Seigaku! Seven games to five.”

“Genichirou,” Seiichi, coming towards him. He wears his jacket the way he always does, a cape on his shoulders. “It’s almost time. Where was Renji going?”

“Where?”

“What?”

“Where did he go?”

Seiichi is frowning. His lips have thinned. “There.” He points down the garden, towards the gates. 

“Genichirou!”

He doesn’t have to look behind, to know that Seiichi will follow. 

Atobe’s massive gardens roll forward, flat and vast as a plain. The main path is filled in with black, white and grey gravel. It crunches after their feet, unsteady as the bottom of a riverbed, surging forwards to gates that rise gold and gleaming, curving up to the sun. 

Renji is standing at the gates. As they catch up to him, he sinks down, resting on the balls of his feet. His hands cover his face. 

Seiichi sinks down next to him. “Renji,” he says. “Renji.”

Genichirou looks up, to the crest of the winding road. The first thing he registers is the boy. The strange, white-haired, red-eyed boy.

The second thing is Fuji. His clothes are dirty, stained with grass. There is a bandage wrapped around his left hand, darkened by blood. 

“Ah,” says Fuji. “Sorry, Yanagi. I didn’t think you had my diary.”


	14. Chapter 14

Chapter Fourteen

Rain. Blood. 

Sun. Cool. 

Winter. Streetlight. 

An Infinite Deep.

His is the hand that does not move, and it is his eyes, he knows, that are wild, mad with imprisonment. The sun pushes, pushes, pushes through the window, and Seiichi cannot protect him from it. All he can do is put the glass of water on the table, and touch his shoulder. 

Outside, a tennis ball hits the transpo. 

The dull crush of tyres over bone. 

“Renji.” 

He realises he has shut his eyes. He opens them, to see Seiichi watching him. 

“Do you want to drink something?”

Seiichi’s mother used to ask that question all the time. When he came over to play; when Genichirou lost a kendo tournament to his brother; when Seiichi was in the hospital, speechless with fear because, for a moment, his arm had ceased to work.

He shakes his head. 

“Fuji’s okay. Only scratches. His hand wasn’t broken, just cut.”

“Renji.”

Why does he keep saying his name? 

“Renji.”

“What?” 

Seiichi’s eyes change at the harshness of his tone. Renji sighs. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” says Seiichi. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand what’s going on, and I should.”

“How?” he asks. 

“I don’t know. I just should. I used to.”  
The ball smacks against the transpo again. Hard and decisive. He doesn’t turn to the window, because he won’t be able to see the court from here. “Who’s playing? Rikkai was next.”

“They’ve stopped the matches.”

He pauses. “What?”

“Fuji’s playing. Against Tezuka.”

Perhaps he should feel something. Concern, because in Fuji’s state, his chances at six straight losses stand at ninety percent. Caution, because he lacks the data to determine how this will influence Tezuka’s mental state. He hasn’t arranged this reprisal for it to come to nothing. 

As it is, he covers his eyes with his hand, and doesn’t speak. 

“You were there,” says Seiichi. “When Fuji was in the accident. Weren’t you.”

It isn’t a question.

“Why didn’t you tell us?”

It is. But he can’t answer. 

“There is so much,” How calm he is, how measured his tone. “You don’t tell us. Have we done something, Renji? Did we do something, a long time ago?”

He knew; that the percentage chance Seiichi would blame himself for their distance was close to seventy eight. Like coat-turned-capes and a voice of iron silk, responsibility is integral to who Seiichi is.

But, as he’d learned, knowing is different from seeing. There is a gap, between knowledge and reality. 

The ache in Seiichi’s voice resonates. Renji reaches up, touches the hand on his shoulder. “No. It was nothing you did.”

Seiichi is inexorable. “When Genichirou and I started dating,” he says. “Did we ignore you? Did we ever give you the feeling that…we might not want you there.”

He smiles. “No.”

“Then, what? What happened?”

There are two possible answers. Distance is one. The natural fading away of friendships over space and time. The other is the truth.

Footsteps. Genichirou stands in the doorway. He is not wearing his cap, and his dark eyes look naked without it, too prominent. They remind Renji of headlights, a shadow on an icy street, the sound of bone and muscle crunched like an apple. 

But it isn’t dark, he remembers. It isn’t dark, and Seiichi is alive and sane beside him. Outside in the sun, Fuji is playing a game with Tezuka. There was a car, it was steering right for him, but Fuji is unhurt. He is unhurt.

A tightness, a pressure in his head that he’d never noticed, lifts.

He does feel sad, he thinks. But it pains him less than he thought it would, when he takes Seiichi’s hand and removes it from his shoulder, when he looks up and looks Genichirou in the eye. 

“I like you,” he says. “Both of you.”

Perhaps it is the relief. 

 

It is a rout.

“Game, Tezuka. Four games to zero.”

Ryoma tugs his cap down. Buchou’s face is impassive. Fuji-senpai’s sweat drips from his arms, down his racquet, and onto the transpo. Both are equally difficult to watch. 

A hand presses lightly against his back. He shoves his hands into his pockets. 

“You’re mad.”

His hands clench. 

“I said I wasn’t coming, I know.” Akise’s voice is light. “Can you come with me, now? There’s something I need to tell you.”

He doesn’t want to go. But it’s better than watching this. He leaves his racquet behind. 

It is easy enough to leave the courts behind them. They walk past patch after patch of flowers, dodge through archways shortened by creeping ivy and flowers that bloom too close to their heads, and find themselves in the water park Atobe had constructed for the weekend. At this time, it is empty. 

Ryoma walks to the edge of the slide, watches the water slip by. 

Akise pushes something at his face. A phone. He cranes back a little, wary of how close it is to his nose. Takes it. Turns it over. It is unlocked. 

“This is a Future Diary.” Low laughter. “Well, it’s a Diary more than a Future Diary. It’s as much about the present. And the past.”

“What does it do?”

“Have a look.” A white finger presses an app for him. Opens a journal. Ryoma recognises it immediately, the lines and lines of data. 

“Inui-senpai.”

“Close. Yanagi-san’s.”

Another app. Photographs, of all flora under the sun. 

“Fuji-san’s.”

Others, all unremarkable at first sight. Akise names each one. “Tezuka-san. Irie-san. Ryoga-nii-san.”

“Nii-san?”

“And this,” he takes the phone, turns it over and then puts it back in Ryoma’s hand. “Is mine.”

He stares for a moment. Shakes his head. “I don’t understand.”

Akise smiles. “I’m not a normal person. You know that, right, Ryoma?”

He shrugs.

“These Diaries. I copied them from somewhere. They aren’t the same. They aren’t,” he laughs. “As bloodthirsty. But the principle is the same.”

“What principle?”

“They all,” he says. “Are about something that someone can’t let go.”

Ryoma ducks his head. He slips his hands back into their pockets. The phone goes with them. 

“What do you think it is, Ryoma? The thing I can’t let go?”

“You know.”

When Akise hugs him, his body is warm. It used to surprise him, how warm a boy could be, when he looked like paper, ice and strawberry-flavoured punch sewn together. It used to. Now, he hugs him back, breathes in the smell of grass and dirt.

“Do you think,” Akise says. “I’m real?”

“Yeah.”

Nose buried in his neck. He can feel the exhalation, hot against his skin. 

“Do you think, what I feel, is it real?”

“Yeah.”

“How do you know?”

He shrugs. “You feel it.”

“It’s that easy.”

Ryoma says, “Your Diary kind of missed the point.”

“Why’s that?”

“It’s not got you in it at all.”

Laughter. It rumbles, reaches into his soul. “Is that what Diaries are for?”

“It’s your life,” he says. “Right?”

 

“Game, Tezuka. Five to zero. Change court.”

The court is silent. No one claps, calls, or talks. No one knows what to say. Kunimitsu walks over to Fuji, who is sitting on the bench and inspecting his bandaged hand. “Stop this.”

“Stop what?”

“This foolishness.”

“You wanted me to play, Tezuka.”

Not like this, he wants to say. Not so desperately. Not as if, and he realises this with a deepening shame, you mean it. 

“You’re hurt.”

“It’s just a few cuts.”

“Fuji.” The despair, it makes its way into his voice. Blue eyes, brilliant and cold, look up into his. Fuji picks up his racquet. 

“Let’s play, Tezuka,” he says. “Let’s play this last game.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to.”

It’s not a reason, but Fuji is already making his way onto the court. Kunimitsu watches him, then looks down at his racquet. He will end it quickly. Then, they can go home. 

It is his turn to serve. 

He tosses the ball into the air, hits it over the net. The smash echoes.

“Fifteen-love.”

Echoes.

“Thirty-love.”

Echoes. Fuji freezes mid-air at the sound, racquet so far from where it should be. Kunimitsu can see how his bad leg trembles. It won’t hold Fuji up much longer. His own arm, so long healed, twinges in remembrance. 

“Forty-love.”

To his left, Eiji whimpers. 

This wasn’t what he wanted, he thinks, as he tosses the ball into the air. All those times against Adalbert, watching his face fall, even as he himself was blinded by the lights and the cameras. All those times against Fuji, the smiling, the repetition, over and over again whilst he perfected a move against a living version of a wall. Every single game today; looking for one moment. What he wanted was one moment. What he wanted was…

The ball smashes into the transpo. 

There is a stunned silence. 

Slowly, Kunimitsu shifts his gaze over his shoulder. The ball rolls away from him, into the surrounding grass. 

“Fuji!” Eiji’s voice. 

He turns back. 

On the court, Fuji’s leg has given out. His hands are braced on the transpo, one clenched around his racquet. He is breathing heavily. Sweat glistens on his skin. “Seventh,” he wheezes. “Seventh counter.”

Around them, the silence breaks. People clap. People are clapping and shouting; their voices are familiar, long-lost but dear, like a clutch of photographs on a shelf. 

Kunimitsu stands up straight. Takes off his glasses, and wipes the tears from his eyes. Walking to the net, he leans down, offers his hand. 

“Tezuka.” Fuji is smiling, smiling with his eyes open, brilliant as the sea. 

What he’d wanted, he thinks. Wasn’t fun. Or excitement. Or pure, unadulterated enjoyment of the game. Tennis has never been just those things to him. 

What he’d wanted, was this. Transcendence. 

“Ah,” he says. When he pulls Fuji up, pulls him close, the world no longer seems so infinite.

 

“What are you doing?”

He can hear clapping in the distance. Someone has won something, but he doesn’t know who. At the moment, he doesn’t care. The swing moves beneath him, and he folds his arms and lets it. 

But Tokugawa is not easily deterred. He sits down next to him. “Here.” Something square and leather hits Genichirou’s legs. His eyes fly open.

Tokugawa is smiling at him. “It hurts, doesn’t it.”

He doesn’t know what hurts more: his head, or the look in Renji’s eyes when he’d backed away and left; half understanding, half pain.

“To think you didn’t know, for so long.”

It is a notebook. Picking it up, he lets the pages flip, fan-like, from cover to cover. Tables, graphs, and handwriting neat as print, all fly in front of his eyes. 

“This is Renji’s.”

“I know.”

He stared at Tokugawa. “You had his diary.”

“I did.”

Abruptly, he wants to throw the thing across the garden. “What,” he says. “Were the bloody things for?”

Tokugawa leans back, elbows resting on the back of the swing. It is so quiet here, even with the clapping and the shouting from the courts. Afternoon is finally ending, and evening settles cool and calm over Atobe’s garden, a whisper to the eyes. 

“I don’t know,” says Tokugawa. “Maybe, they were just so someone knew.”

“Knew what?”

“That there was something.”

“What?”

“Something we needed them to know.”

Genichirou shuts his eyes. Tight. Then, he stands up. 

“Going somewhere?”

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

He touches his head. It is bare. At some point, running after Renji, he’d lost it. “I’m going to find my cap.”

 

Syusuke will always remember this: the impact.

“Fuji-san!”

The impact, when he throws himself to the side, snaps the cord on which his camera hangs, and when he stops rolling, comes to rest, staring up into the eaves above, his hand lands on it. Broken glass bites into his skin. He is too shocked to even cry out. 

Akise is crouching over him. His pupils have blown wide with fear; his eyes are a deep, violent purple. Syusuke looks away, looks up into a world suddenly bursting with colour, with sound. Leaves, sun, birds, silence, all of it is magnified, clear and sharp as if under the shards of a microscope. His blood is hot in his ears, his life pumps so steadily through him, and yet it is the leaves that are louder. The leaves and the sun and the birds and the silence. 

“Fuji-san, are you hurt?”

“Akise-kun,” His voice is thin as a thread. Is that fear? He doesn’t feel it. “I’m not scared anymore.”

A hand lifts his; the movement makes him flinch, aware of every shard in his skin. He laughs. 

“Fuji-san.” The boy’s tone is reprimanding. 

“But, Akise.” The name anchors him, makes things more concrete, so that when he speaks next, it is with a new seriousness. “There is so much, here, that I want.”   
Infinite Deep.

Infinite Deep.

Infinite Deep.

Infinite.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading this until the end! I hope you enjoyed it, and if you have some time, feedback or just a comment would be nice! I'm glad I got to share this with you :)


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